


Beyond Calculation

by Deejaymil



Category: Criminal Minds (US TV)
Genre: ....and Spencer is obliviously blind to their flaws, Accidental Baby Acquisition, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Fluff and Humor, Kidfic, Parenthood, Silly, They're the best parents, absolute madness, but their kids are actually absolutely planning to take over the world, the one where they accidentally have Too Many Children
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-04-07
Updated: 2017-04-30
Packaged: 2018-10-15 23:53:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 30
Words: 21,440
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10559850
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Deejaymil/pseuds/Deejaymil
Summary: Spencer had noticed an interesting progression of reactions over the years. At one, people would smile and coo and tell him how proud he must be. Which was true. Hewasproud, impossibly so. And when they told everyone Number Two was on its way, those people kept smiling and saying odd things like, "Oh, completing the set are you?"When Number Two turned out to be Numbers Two, Three, and Four, the smiles vanished. But he didn't care, even if sometimes he wondered if everyone's family contained a mad (but mostly chaotic neutral) scientist, a possible witch, or a child who he was pretty sure was planning to take over the world. Benevolently.And he never stopped being proud.





	1. April 1st: A Honeymoon

**Author's Note:**

  * For [blythechild](https://archiveofourown.org/users/blythechild/gifts).



> _"Parents are the bones on which children sharpen their teeth."_ -  **Peter Ustinov**
> 
> __

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Snapshot Saturday – **Beginning**  – Image Prompt_
> 
> __

Emily leaned against the window, letting the train rock her as she peered up at the barest slit of sky visible outside. Spencer was sprawled on the berth as they rattled onwards, grey-shale cliffs outside cutting away the sun and plunging them into a flickering darkness. Blue light cast a ghastly shadow up onto his sharp features, an earbud hanging from his ear as he watched a video on his phone with the sheet tangled around his body. She turned and watched him, shivering as the train slipped into a tunnel. With a twitch and a hiss, he jolted and she remembered his fear of the dark. It was two steps to slip into the bed beside him, and the work of a second to wrap her hands around his and put the phone to the side, straddling his slim body overtop of the sheet.

“Hold your breath until the end of the tunnel,” Emily said pertly, slotting her lips onto his and tasting the smile that traced them. She felt his chest rise, fall, and he held his breath. Every heartbeat of darkness was another kiss she laid, her hand braced against the battering pulse in his throat and aware that his interest was beginning to divert elsewhere. The sleeping compartment was locked, they had another entire day of this sleepy travel…

Hours to kill.

As the train burst out of the tunnel and into sharp blue-yellow light, he brought his hand up to cup her cheek, surging up to kiss her fiercely as he exhaled, and his wedding ring was warm on her skin.

“See,” he murmured into her mouth. “Told you a train was a wonderful honeymoon idea. Far safer than the beach you wanted. What could _possibly_ go wrong in a train?” Laughing, she let him roll her back into the bed, tumbling gleefully into this new life of theirs.

Five weeks later, perched on the rim of the bath with the little blue plus-sign grinning up at her, while he stared at her all foamy and confused, she’d remember this moment.


	2. April 2nd: A Sticky Murder

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Scenic Sunday – **Oops**  – The red pooling on the carpet could spell the beginning of the end for your character’s sanity._

It had been a unanimous decision between the two of them, Spencer staying home with Livy and Emily returning to work. Well, it had mostly been Spencer’s decision, trotting to the car beside Emily as the contractions had kept up and rattling off every statistic he knew on how integral it was that at least _one_ of them remain home for their child’s formative years. She’d loved him for his passionate thought to their child’s wellbeing, even if at the time, she’d been a little less than appreciative of his timing.

Somehow, that arrangement had just sort of… continued. And everything was peaceful, even if Emily wasn’t home as much as she wanted to be and even if it was kind of lonely only having Spence appearing at their cases as a fuzzy face conferencing in from home, usually covered in paint or flour or ink and half-distracted by background noises. They missed him, but he didn’t seem to miss them. Emily was scared to ask when he was coming back to the team, in case she got the answer she suspected he’d give.

On this day, she was considering asking, but then she came home to the red and a silent house. She was already reaching for her gun before she’d consciously realized that no one had responded to her, “I’m home,” with a _Mommy!_ or an equally excited _Emily!_

Padding into the living room, she found the red. In the darkened room—because it was late, just past dinner, but all the lights were out and she was already dialling Hotch’s number even as her heart slammed twice—there was red on the walls, splashed across the carpet, drenching the cream-coloured couch she’d bought before Olivia was a possibility and regretted immediately after they’d brought their baby home.

Emily took a shaky breath. Tried to call out and her voice cracked. Hotch answered the phone with a tired, “Prentiss?” and she might have whispered something like, “There’s no one here…” and later she’d hate how much she’d overreacted in this moment. But then there was a thump upstairs. She turned, slowly, Hotch soothing her, and then heard a giggle. A splash. The distinct sound of skin slipping on the bottom of the bath as someone small and wiggly flapped about.

“Emily?” Hotch asked cautiously.

“Never mind, they’re here,” Emily said, and felt very small and stupid as she climbed the stairs and pushed open the bathroom door to find her husband vigorously scrubbing a bright red toddler. “Uh. Painted.”

Two pairs of eyes turned to her, Livy covering her mouth with a loud, “Oh no, don’t tell Mommy!”

Hotch laughed. “I’ll let you go,” he said, trying to hide that he was still smiling. “Don’t be too harsh on them. Sometimes, I had trouble leaving the work behind at first as well.”

And then he was gone.

“Explain,” she said, folding her arms and hoping Spencer wouldn’t notice she was still wearing her gun.

“Olivia… painted,” Spencer began, with the awkward frog smile he did when he wasn’t telling the whole truth. “And, ah, I was… reading. And didn’t notice. She’s very quiet, you know…”

“Mommy, there was a murder,” Livy said. Emily blinked. “A bad murder!”

“Very bad,” Spencer agreed, wincing. “And, um, Olivia decided to…”

“Inveggitate.” Livy nodded, red on her face and her belly and Emily leaned forward and winced to see it everywhere else as well. “Like you, Mommy. See!” And she held up her red-painted hands, the black curls topping her head sticking out in all directions.

And Emily clicked, because Spencer was never one to miss a ‘teachable moment.’ “Spencer,” she began quietly, and saw him swallow. “Did you… immediately take the paint from our daughter?”

“Uh,” said Spencer. There was, Emily noticed, paint on him as well. Suspiciously deliberate paint, drawn with a much steadier hand than a barely four-year-old could manage. “No. I… well, it’s not actually paint, it’s ah, shaving foam. And nail polish. Which is rather clever of her, I thought—”

“It’s blud,” Livy corrected. “Murder blud.”

“Did you tell our child that painting on the furniture is a bad thing to do?” Emily asked, and counted to seven in her head. _Patience, Prentiss, endless patience._

“Ah,” said Spencer. He began to blink rapidly. “Yes. Sort of.”

“He said don’t tell Mommy, Mommy,” Livy said helpfully.

“Did you,” Emily finished, “today, while I was at work, begin teaching our three-year-old about murder?” Silence. Emily desperately channelled Hotch to stay calm.

“Well,” said Spencer. “I didn’t _quite_ use that terminology… and she’s really much closer to four than three.”

“Blud spattering analysis,” Livy finished, and leapt up in the bath to be steadied by her dad’s hands. “So that we know the murder was a _gun_ murder, Mommy, not a sticky murder.”

It was about then that Spencer noticed she was still wearing her weapon.


	3. April 3rd: A Friendly Ghost

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Maxim Monday – **J. M. Barrie**  – “Ghosts were created when the first man woke in the night.”_

Spencer woke to the strange feeling that he was being watched. Four years of father training overcame the six years of FBI training previously, and he managed not to throw his daughter into the wall as he opened his eyes to find two huge brown eyes barely an inch from his.

“Hi, Daddy,” Olivia whispered, glancing back over her shoulder and narrowing those eyes. “Shh. _He’s here_.”

This, Spencer thought, was why horror movies so consistently starred children as antagonists.

“Who is _he_?” he asked, reaching up with one arm to hook it around his daughter and roll her over; making her giggle as she expected him to be tickled but also surreptitiously placing his body between her and the open doorway. She grumbled at his voice, jiggling, and he corrected himself with a whispered, “Sorry, I mean, _who is he?”_

“A ghost,” Olivia told him seriously. Spencer swallowed and chuckled nervously. Looked at the door, back down at his daughter, and then turned on the bedroom lamp. For Olivia. Yes. So she didn’t get scared. “He’s my friend now.”

Of _course_ he was.

“Back to bed I think.” Spencer picked her up, crawled off the bed and paused by the door, Olivia nodding along placidly in his arms. Her unfortunate habit of creating crime scenes aside, she was an incredibly docile child. Very agreeable. He leaned out the bedroom door, looking up the hall to the warm light of her nightlight showing from inside her room. “Hmm.”

“My room is that way,” she said helpfully, pointing.

Emily would be home in a few hours. Late. And she wouldn’t be happy if she found a terrified child, stricken by nightmares and thinking about overly friendly ghosts showing up at all hours of the night…

“New plan,” said Spencer, turning and walking back to the bed. “Sleepover with Daddy, yes?”

“Whheeee!” Olivia agreed with a giggle. “Can my ghost come too?”

Spencer squeaked, “No,” and scuttled back under the covers.

“Gotta turn the light off, Daddy.” Olivia cocked an eyebrow, an expression she’d almost certainly learned from her mother. “It’s night-time.”

“I will,” said Spencer, and looked at the lamp. “Soon.”

Emily came home to a peacefully snoozing daughter and Spencer staring blearily at the door, twitching as she walked in. Lamp still on.

“What’s wrong with you?” she asked. Gun already away, she kicked her pants off and crawled onto the bed, kissing their daughter first before moving on to her fidgety husband. “Is Livy okay?”

Spencer looked down at the child between them and said, “She’s making friends with ghosts,” and then, without consciously planning on saying it, added: “Sometimes I think we lucked out with her. I wonder if the next will be so affable.”

Emily tensed. “The next?” Eyebrow cocked, just like her daughter had before.

Oops.

“I mean.” Spencer wiggled, glancing nervously to the door one final time. “Um.”

Olivia yawned, opened one sleepy eye, and murmured, “Hi, Mommy,” before snoring loudly. Emily blinked, and then smiled. Somehow, the smile was scarier than Livy’s ghost had been.

“I think,” she said quietly, and Spencer winced again, “we should move her to her room. And lock the door, perhaps.”

Oh.

_Oh_.

“I agree,” Spencer rushed to say, and didn’t even check the hallway for ghosts in his haste to comply.


	4. April 4th: A Surprising Count

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Tonal Tuesday – **Bewildered**  – The tone is dizzyingly disconcerted, positively perplexed, absolutely astonished! What could possibly have happened?_

“Ha ha,” said Emily. And then again, quieter this time and slightly more shell-shocked, “haahaha…”

Spencer said nothing. Just blinked, slowly, and stared at the ultrasound technician. To her credit, the woman looked entirely nonplussed about the hazy look he was levelling at her.

“It does appear that there’s more than one in there,” the woman continued, shifting the wand around on Emily’s gloopy stomach. Emily, in response, stared down at the abdomen that contained her traitorous ovaries, not entirely sure why her body had felt the need to betray her like this. “I’m counting, multiple arms and legs, here and here, and here’s another hand…”

“That’s a foot,” Spencer said absently, dropping back into the world of the living in order to correct misinformation, of course. “What you’re pointing to? That’s certainly a foot.”

The ultrasound tech’s smile slipped. “I think it might be a hand,” she argued, and Emily closed her eyes. Hand, foot, did it matter? _Twins_. They weren’t ready for twins. Spencer couldn’t handle twins _and_ Livy, they couldn’t afford to both not work, they’d have to hire a nanny and having someone else around the house would fluster—

“It’s a foot,” said Spencer firmly. “As is that, and that, and that and… ah. Those…”

Emily was still calculating whether they’d have to move to fit another two beds, when Spencer made a low, despairing kind of noise and stood up. Grey and wobbly, his hand slid on the wall as he fumbled to keep himself upright.

“Woah,” Emily said, and bolted up on the bed with her hand reaching towards him. He took it, swaying, and steadied himself. Against her skin, his palm was damp and clammy.

“Five feet,” he groaned.

Emily’s first thought, and one she would _never_ admit to, was ‘oh boy, three footed baby.’

Her second was ‘oh fuck’.

“Congratulations,” said the ultrasound tech, now smiling again with a smug kind of satisfaction that she’d managed to shut up Spencer, finally, although really, Emily’s eggs and Spencer’s _extremely fucking virulent_ sperm had really done all the work. “Triplets!”

“That means three babies,” said Olivia helpfully from where she was quietly colouring in the corner of the room. “That’s an awful lot. How did you get _three_ babies?”

They both looked at her.

“Hellin’s law,” Spencer said, and then burst into tears.

“Uh oh,” said Olivia. “Maybe you should put some back. Daddy’s sad.”


	5. April 5th: A Foamy Situation

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Wordsmith Wednesday – **Halcyon**  – “Denoting a period of time in the past that was idyllically happy and peaceful.”_

The note was polite but firm, drawn with a shaky hand. If Spencer was to profile the handwriting—and he was, mostly to put off the moment he had to lift his gaze from the tattered slip and up to face the accused—he would say the writer was male, in some considerable distress, having clearly undergone some blow to his intrinsic motivations to complete his—

“Dad, we can explain.” The voice only wavered a little. Spencer studied the note a little longer before looking up and at his son. His eyebrowless son.

“Can you?” he asked mildly, and let them see his eyeline slip slowly to the clock. “Well, I should think you’d better hurry about that, because your mom is going to be home soon.”

Three throats shifted nervously as the children swallowed in unison, eyes widening. A straggling line of Reids along the wall with their hands clasped in front and their expressions apprehensive, it was the very picture of discipline. And it was completely an act.

Only three throats had swallowed.

Spencer spent his days, and some nights, facing down some of the most deranged men and women the human race had ever created. So, he leaned forward, chose his target, and went for the weakest link. Not Olivia—she’d never give up her secrets. Not the girls, standing side by side in matching outfits—which was _bizarre_ , because both Emily and Spencer were explicit in their desire that just because the girls _looked_ alike, it didn’t mean they were the same person. Spencer was sure they’d never even bought them matching outfits, especially not ones with C on the front of one and A on the other. The C, notably, being on the front of Alyssa’s shirt; the A on Caroline’s.

No. He didn’t go for them, especially as Alyssa barely managed to hide a smirk by fake sneezing and covering her mouth, Caroline’s expression deceptively blank.

“Tristan,” he said, and looked at the boy. The boy who shrunk back. All the girls looked at him too; Olivia sympathetic, Caroline and Alyssa smiling innocently. “Allow me to read this note while you ‘explain’, yes?”

“Yes, Dad,” Tristan whispered, his eyes growing bigger.

“’Dear Mr. and Mrs. Reid-Prentiss’,” Reid read loudly. “‘Your children are’—this is verbatim, kids— ‘monstrous. Truly monstrous. The little girls are adorable’—” Caroline and Alyssa beamed, “— ‘but they use this innocence to slip under my defences and, before I know it, my bedroom is radioactive’— _radioactive_?”

“Accidentally,” Tristan tried, blinking rapidly. Alyssa’s hands, Spencer noted, were behind her back. And the wall behind her was glowing. “And not radioactive. Honestly, Dad, the man is a loon. His witness testimony shouldn’t be counted for anything—we’re _six_. Where could we possibly find the materials to create a radioactive bedroom?”

“We just spilt some foam,” said Caroline. “Just a little. But it got bigger. We don’t know why.”

“We really don’t,” added Alyssa, who had once created a small volcanic eruption of vinegar and baking soda out of the clothes washer by filling all her pockets with the separate ingredients and ‘helping’ their previous nanny do the washing… at three. “We’re _just_ children.”

“Unprecedented exponential growth,” said Tristan glumly. The smartest of them all, but unfortunately, also the most easily manipulated. “How were we to know the man had a nervous temperament? You should really screen your employees better, to be honest.”

Spencer looked down at the resignation letter of their twelfth nanny, a man whose reference list entitled such things as ‘boarding school for wayward boys’ and ‘youth hostel’, and sighed, fed up. And a little more than slightly curious about how they’d filled the _entire_ bedroom up with green glowing foam… but showing any interest would just encourage them, he knew.

“Clean it up,” he told them. “And I want whatever chemicals you used on my desk within the next twenty minutes, or I’m disconnecting the internet and locking the library door.” Only three faces fell, and he quickly added, “ _And_ the garden shed.” Alyssa wailed. “And if there’s anything on my desk that has toxic or corrosive capabilities, you’ll _all_ be writing up occupational health and safety reports.” The children filed out, alternating between looking shamefaced and a little guilty. Olivia was last, pausing in the doorway.

“Daddy, do you remember how wonderful it was when it was _just_ me?” she asked, leaning against the doorframe and smiling wistfully. “How quiet, how _calm_. Positively halcyon, wouldn’t you say?”

Spencer heard the front door opening, Emily calling out a hello. Wilting a little at the discussion they were about to have— _I **told** you not to teach them chemistry! _ —he frowned at the nine-year-old and asked, “And just _why_ is Tristan missing his eyebrows, Olivia?”

Brown eyes widened innocently. He didn’t believe it for a moment. Olivia might be the quietest and the calmest and the least likely to be explicitly involved with mad foam schemes… but he also seriously doubted _any_ six year olds, even _his_ six year olds, understood psychological manipulation quite to the extent that the slow breakdown of their nannies’ mental facilities facilitated. He worried, in fact, that their eldest child might be the most frightening of them all, and they’d dutifully delivered her a terribly smart, terribly eager little army of genius savants in the form of her baby siblings.

“Well, gosh, Daddy,” Olivia replied, cocking her eyebrow up with a cheeky smile. “I’m really not sure. He’s such an odd little thing. But I’m sure there’s a story behind it, aren’t you?” And she bounced away, her voice calling out, _Hi, Mommy,_ as she went.

Emily walked in, frowning. “There’s glowing green foam on the stairs,” she said, and then paused when she saw his face. “What’s wrong? What have the horde done _now_?”

“Our children are going to take over the world,” Spencer replied dolefully. “And I’m afraid I’m probably going to let them.”


	6. April 6th: A Devious Plot

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Typecast Thursday – **The One Bed Conundrum**  – GASP, there’s only one bed. Uncliché the most cliché of all fanfiction premises._

“Our children are gaslighting me,” Emily told Spencer, watching him pause on the grainy screen of the laptop with a forkful of noodles halfway to his mouth. Behind him, she could see pastel wallpaper and the barest hint of a bland hotel lamp. “I’m considering adoption.”

“We could probably sell them as a set,” Spencer said thoughtfully, lowering the noodles.

“Not them,” Emily corrected, hearing giggles from up the hall. “Me. I’m considering putting myself up for adoption. Maybe JJ. Do you think JJ will adopt me?”

“No.” Spencer was smiling now, softly and in the way that suggested he was thinking fondly about his children. A self defence mechanism, Emily was sure, because she wasn’t thinking fondly about any of their little hellions right now. “She thinks they’re all darlings.”

“She’s deluded,” Emily muttered. “Are you going to ask what they’ve done?” Because she wanted to tell him. Oh _boy_ , did she want to tell him. And then she wanted to ring her own mother and tell her she was never allowed to complain about Emily as a child ever again, not until she had Emily plus three others.

“I think you’re going to tell me whether I ask or not. Morgan is here by the way.”

There was a deep chuckle from the other end of the Skype call. “Told you not to procreate with him,” Morgan called from off-screen, earning a scowl from Spencer. “Especially not multiple times.”

“In her defence, she only agreed to two,” Spencer said. There was sauce on his nose.

_I picked this, I picked this, I picked **him** , _she repeated patiently, and the giggles got louder. Eying her closed bedroom door nervously, she could _sense_ the bare feet padding towards her, seeing flickers of light and shadow dancing under the bottom as they crouched and listened in. Amateurs. She knew it was the girls. Tristan, the clever little shit, hung his old baby monitor on a rope outside the bedroom window, safe in his room above. “They’ve hidden their beds.”

Spencer stopped. Not just paused; she actually saw his brain try to process that before grating to a halt and leaving him staring blankly at the screen. Fascinated, she leaned closer and examined the only sign of life remaining, a nerve twitching below one eye.

Morgan appeared. “I’m sorry, what?”

“They’ve hidden their beds,” Emily repeated, leaning back against her headboard and folding her arms, making sure to channel Hotch into her frown to head off any impressed reactions from her shit-at-behavioural-management husband. “They’re gone. All of them. All four, vanished. Not a damn sign. The carpets aren’t even compressed from where they _used_ to be.” With a flick of her thumb, she unlocked her phone and hit send, waiting a few beats for Spencer’s phone to beep on the other end. “Look.”

Spencer, still restarting, just blinked. Morgan picked up his phone instead, opening it and raising an eyebrow at the pictures of the bedrooms Emily had told their children to clean. And they’d cleaned them. Spotlessly, even dusting the tops of the ceiling fans.

They’d also somehow removed their beds. Without Emily noticing.

“But _why_?” Morgan asked, and he sure as fuck looked impressed and a little overwhelmed. _Welcome to my world,_ Emily thought grimly.

“Because they’re gaslighting me,” she repeated. Another giggle, this time muffled, and she looked to the window where the shadow of a boxy shape was just barely visible behind the curtain. “They’re grumpy I’m here instead of yet another nanny to torture.” Actually, she rather thought they were quite _pleased_ she’d taken the month off with them rather than throwing them another human sacrifice. In fact, she’d put money on this being a product of them already misbehaving out of their shared misery about the month almost being up.

That was enough to make her feel small and sad about not being here for them all the time though, and she quickly sidelined it. They didn’t have a choice. They both _had_ to work. And, horribly, Emily knew she was hitting her limit with how long she could be content not being in the field, even with her children testing her just as much as any unsub had.

“I don’t think they’re gaslighting you,” Spencer said suddenly, snapping back to life. “I think… they’re being _helpful_. Our children rarely do anything without a reason, Emily. If we profile them…”

“Don’t profile them,” Emily said, but he ignored her.

“… then we’d look for a stressor. What’s changed?”

Emily shrugged helplessly. They’d been _fine_. Garcia had come over the night before to help move their bedrooms around, shifting Caroline and Alyssa into Olivia’s old room as Olivia finally got her wish and moved up into the… attic.

“Tristan’s in his own room now,” she said, and looked again at the window. The giggles had stopped. “He’s never been on his own before.” There was a whisper by the door, the thump of feet hurrying away. “And now there’s only one bed… _our_ bed… so he’ll…”

“Have to sleep in there,” Spencer finished, smiling, and _now_ he looked proud. She allowed it. “With you and his sisters. Not alone. Oh, _Emily_ , they were _helping_ him.” He looked positively giddy.

The door opened suddenly, Tristan tumbling in shoved by small hands. “I’m not scared,” he announced, thrusting his little chest out and trying to look determined. “We _were_ being mean, Mom, we were being _terrible_. Not helpful at all.”

“So naughty!” Olivia added, appearing behind him. “But you’re right, we _will_ have to sleep in here.”

“How awful,” Tristan added, and looked hopeful.

“Terrible,” Emily said dryly, sliding over to make room and wincing as three bodies were suddenly hurtling at her, Olivia following sedately behind. “Well, come on then.”

Maybe her children were only sometimes evil.


	7. April 7th: A Tall Tale

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Fiendish Friday – **Reversal**  – Tell a tale backwards, from the end to the beginning._

Once upon a time last weekend there was a man who was a hero. He had a wife who was a hero too who he loved very, very much and he also had a lot of children who weren’t heroes but might be one day. Some of them. He thought that his son would definitely be a hero but in a quiet kind of way because he was always making arguments as to why things were wrong and should be better and using words like ‘moralistic’ and ‘responsibility’ and ‘patronising’. He thought maybe his silliest daughter might be a hero one day, because she told stories and painted and people like people who create things, even if those things were silly. He thought maybe his oldest daughter would either be a Hero or a Villain, depending on what was most interesting to her at the time and whether she was feeling Goth that day. But that’s not really what this story is about. This is the story of his youngest daughter and whether she was going to be a hero but really it’s his story and she’s just paying attention.

Just after she was born, there were Too Many Babies and Not Enough Space, the man said, so they had to move. And they moved from a Very Nice Apartment to a Sort of Nice House. But it wasn’t that nice, and sometimes people shouted outside. And the man and his youngest daughter were home one day and he was teaching her things that he Wasn’t Allowed when Mom was home because they were chemically and fun and Mom hates both those things (but she promised to teach me how to shoot a Gun one day if I don’t tell Dad because he thinks We Shouldn’t and Mom thinks we’re Very Capable).

He went to take a phone call and he was at the back of the house in his office which when he shuts the door, because his Many Babies make Many Noises and sometimes he had to concentrate, he can’t always hear us properly. And he never usually closes the door just in case unless he’s talking about Murder things that we’re not allowed to know about, which has to do with being a hero and carrying a Gun and staying out all night.

So the door was shut and the girl had to sit on her hands because otherwise her Dad would know she was touching the chemicals without him which she isn’t allowed to do after last time, and there was a noise out the front. A Scream. And the girl had to decide what to do.

A lot of thinking goes into a moment when you have to decide what to do. And stuff you know comes into it and she was two weeks younger than now at the time so there wasn’t a whole lot she knew but she did know her Dad.

Once, before she was born, Mommy and Daddy were trapped in a bad place by bad men and had to think about what to do to save everyone and also themselves. And Mommy ended up keeping Daddy safe by telling them that she was the hero and not Daddy. And the girl thought of this and thought maybe she should go and tell the person outside that she was a hero instead of Daddy because Daddies can get hurt, sometimes, and she didn’t want that.

But there was also another story she knew. A long long long time before she was born, before Mommy and Daddy even loved each other, a bad man took Daddy and hurt him real bad. And he was alone and he tells that story sometimes and always says how much he needed his friends and how they came for him and how you should never be afraid to ask for help when you need it. So the girl thought she should probably go ask him, even though he was on the phone with a Very Important Caller, because he let them interrupt if it was important or explosive or dangerous or if Tristan was on fire Again.

When Daddy was very small, his Mommy was sick. And she couldn’t look after him so he looked after himself. And he tells us, we don’t have to be like that. Him and Mommy will always look after us.

So the girl went and got her Daddy and said there was a Scream and he went and saved a lady with his gun, because that lady was being hurt by a Bad Man. And Daddy wasn’t hurt and he said that I was a hero then too, even though I don’t make things and I don’t use big words and he won’t let me carry his gun.

And What I Learned was that a lot of thinking goes into doing and also what happened before the start of the story is sometimes really important

 

Alyssa J. Reid-Prentiss, aged eight and 4/5s

For the assignment ‘What I Learned Last Weekend’

 

_‘Great work, Lys, but I asked for a true story. We’re writing narratives next week—perhaps then you can write about heroes and baddies! Please resubmit with a story that happened to **you**.’ Mr. Peters._


	8. April 8th: An Oops Tiger

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Snapshot Saturday – **What? –** Image Prompt_

“I think we should let the kids paint their rooms,” Spencer said one day, and Emily paused in the act of brushing her hair and turned to examine her husband, looking for visible signs that he’d taken complete leave of his senses. Spencer, busy knotting his tie at a perfectly crooked angle, didn’t seem to notice. “That would be fun, wouldn’t it? I think they’d like that. I wanted to paint my room when I was a kid, but I didn’t have the means to do so.”

“So did I, I wasn’t allowed,” Emily replied, and resisted adding, ‘for damn good reasons’. She put the brush down, perched on the side of the dresser, and thought of Olivia. Olivia, who’d recently turned eleven and requested for her birthday: a raven, a pixie cut, and for her name to be legally changed to ‘Edgar, and please don’t call me Livy anymore, that’s my _baby_ name’. “Are we going to need to discuss this?”

They’d found that with the more ‘subjective’ parenting choices, sometimes it was best left to one parent or the other to decide. That was how Spencer had won the ‘Alyssa gets a chemistry set at the age of four’ while Emily had triumphed in the ‘no, the children don’t need a dog to experiment on, they have each other’.

Spencer looked wistful. “No,” he said, and she saw his shoulders slump a little. Damnit. Man had already been happily dreaming up a blissful afternoon discussing colour schemes with his madcap children. Did he not actually _know_ the people they’d created? “It’s okay. It was just an idea.”

Emily thought of Olivia again, and how she’d taken to writing _Nevermore, quoth my goth life_ over the front of all her school workbooks, and then she looked again at Spencer’s sadly angled shoulders.

Fuck.

“This one is on you,” she warned him, rolling her eyes as he whooped and dashed off to tell the children. Nauseous and blaming her trepidation about what their poor house was about to undergo, she sat down on the bed and waited for the anarchy.

Olivia, as expected, immediately demanded, “Black. To match my _soul_.” Emily winced and remembered being eleven with a shudder. Olivia’s recent colour scheme consisted of black, deep purples, silvers, and sapphire blue. It was actually rather pleasing, when she went easy on the black, but Emily had drawn the line at purple lipstick.

“Black rooms have negative psychological impact,” Spencer rebutted immediately without skipping a beat, in-between assuring Cary and Lys that they could halve their room and paint their sides how they wished, and reassuring Tristan that, “Yes you _are_ creative, and no I won’t make you paint something if you don’t want to, and yes, we will help you if you’re unsure.” Emily, despite having witnessed Spencer parenting for the last eleven years, was still impressed and a little turned on by how damn _good_ he was at it. And she felt a little bad for doubting him.

She was also planning on turning the kids out for the afternoon to show him just _how_ proud.

“Stifling my creativity will have lifelong effects on my self-efficacy,” Olivia responded pertly. “But I’ll fold. Purple, with brown borders. But I get to paint the door black. And I’m putting up crime scene photos.”

“Purple _is_ considered a creative colour,” Tristan offered, before hurriedly adding, “But I don’t want purple, no thanks.”

“Fine, purple, and no _real_ crime scenes, replications only,” Spencer agreed, and it was done.

“Right, you lot, out, and Olivia, you help the kids pick their colours,” Emily demanded, clapping her hands to chase the lot of them to the front door in a wave of scarves and bobble hats and booted feet. “Have fun, good luck.”

The front door banged shut. “Um,” said Spencer, right before she grabbed him by his tie and hauled him upstairs, earning a startled, “Oh!” as he realized what was happening.

Sometimes he was smart about things.

 

* * *

 

The bedrooms were painted. Olivia’s turned out almost okay, although it was still gloomy. Emily looked at her pleased-as-punch daughter with her spiky hair and the budgie—Edgar—Emily had conceded to in lieu of the raven sitting on her shoulder, as they shifted her furniture back into her now dry bedroom, and sighed as she thought of the years to come.

Tristan’s room was next. Cary, the artist of the family, and Spencer, the validator of all crazy schemes, had sequestered themselves in the bedroom with him for _hours_ before deciding that what they were planning was ‘secret’.

What they were planning, Emily found, was _wonderful_.

“Oh,” she said, leaning on the doorframe and staring at the half-coated wall. Not painted at all. They were _wallpapering_ it, using wallpaper Spencer and Cary had designed, covered in pages and pages of all the novels and tales they’d read together over the years. Emily could even see some of her favourites among the tiny text, creating a pleasing pattern when one stepped far enough away that the words were obscured. “This is _lovely_ , Tris.” Her boy beamed shyly, seemingly unaware that Cary had taken the chance to stick some wallpaper to his back while he was distracted. Or maybe he was aware, and was hoping that the wallpaper would allow him to hide in his bedroom more effectively.

Alyssa announced that she ‘didn’t care’ what colour they painted her room, and eventually allowed Cary to claim rights over the whole thing. Emily warily made a mental note to find out how much that had cost Alyssa before they had another phone call home from the school to tell them that ‘your daughters have been swapping places again, we think’.

Cary chose whiteboard paint, and Spencer was _gleeful_. The room was duly painted, they were given the pens to use on them, and the parents stepped back to see what they came up with. Alyssa, unsurprisingly, covered hers with complicated chemical equations and one small section devoted to drawing unicorns. Cary drew a vicious tiger diving into a pool, great lips curled back to reveal dangerous fangs. It was huge. It was intimidating. It was _impressive_ as fuck.

“That’s… exciting,” said Emily, leaning against Spencer’s chest as they peered up at the huge mural taking up the entirety of one wall. “Um. _Why_?”

“It’s Tiger,” Cary explained dreamily, clearly off in another daydream. The girl spent more time in her head than out of it. “She’s swimming right now, but she’ll be out soon. When she gets sick of it. She’s _fierce_.”

“Interesting,” murmured Spencer, wrapping his arms around Emily’s belly and leaning his chin on her shoulder. “And what is Tiger, besides an actual tiger? Is she symbolic of something?”

“Don’t psychoanalyse the children, Spencer,” Emily scolded softly.

Cary just smiled, and pointed to Emily. Emily blinked. As one, her, Spencer, and Alyssa all looked at her stomach.

“Oh _no,_ not _another_ one,” Lys groaned, tugging a pillow over her face and screaming into it. “Mom, _honestly.”_

“Uh,” said Spencer, his heart galloping once with shock against Emily’s back. “Honey, that’s not possible. Daddy had a surgery to make sure that couldn’t happen.”

Cary just smiled more. “Like Tiger cares about _that_ ,” she said, tossing her hair back. “Science isn’t _everything_ , Daddy.”

A week later, Emily and Spencer stepped out of the doctor’s clinic and walked silently to the car.

“I’m almost fifty.” Emily felt wobbly, pole-axed. So much could go wrong. _So much_. “You had a _vasectomy_. What are the fucking chances?”

“One in four-thousand,” answered Spencer promptly, of course, while glancing down suspiciously at his crotch as though suddenly assured of his dick’s magical properties. Emily looked too, just in case. Maybe he was onto something. “Age is something we need to consider moving forward, but you had the triplets at forty… and they’re healthy and developing well over average for their age.” He was still staring at his crotch, and almost tumbled into a pothole as a result. They went quiet, both deep in their own thoughts.

“What’s five when we already have four?” Emily said eventually, breaking the silence. “How much more broken can we possibly get?”

“I don’t think the sunk cost fallacy applies to number of _children_ ,” Spencer rebutted, finally looking away from his Magic Dick, as Emily had now decided it would be titled. Privately. “No one is going to believe us about this, are they?”

No one did, but six months later, Tiger showed up anyway. Early.

And she was nowhere near as fierce as advertised.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> **OOPS.**


	9. April 9th: A Terrible Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Scenic Sunday – **Uh Oh** – Your character wakes to a silent world._

Tristan loved the night time. He knew his dad worried about it, even now, and his sisters were pretty ambivalent about the concept of time in general, but he _loved_ it. And he thought Mia might like it too.

He got his best reading done at night, without his siblings bothering him or trying to experiment on him or Dad turning things into ‘teachable moments’, which were always super engaging and interesting, but also always _distracting_. And sometimes Mom would start grumbling that she wasn’t the favourite and make sad faces and pout about and then he’d have to go hug her and promise that he loved both his parents equally and then get dragged into family board game nights. Which were always loud and occasionally explosive, and Cluedo was totally banned and they still hadn’t admitted that Alyssa had melted the Monopoly board in the bathtub.

Yeah, night was _way_ more productive. But he wasn’t the only one who liked night anymore.

“Hi, Kitten,” he said, padding past her room and leaning in to find his baby sister peering silently out at him from inside her crib. A shy smile was his answer as she held her arms out for ‘up’, “Wanna come to the library?”

She nodded. Sixteen months old, she was unequivocally his favourite sister, ever since Mom and Dad had brought her home from the hospital all tiny and sleepy and quiet and new. He was kind of glad she’d been born so early. It seemed impossible he’d ever enjoyed the night as much without his silent observer with him. All his other sisters were too _loud_ , or Olivia, and she didn’t count because she was fourteen now and thought her siblings were babyish and dumb. Which they weren’t. Tristan was quite sure that he was at _least_ as clever as her, even if he was only studying at a high school level and not college like she was. But that wasn’t a factor of intelligence, she’d just had more time to think than he’d had.

Well, okay, Caroline could be pretty dumb sometimes, and Alyssa was babyish when she didn’t get her own way, but _still._

Mia nestled her head against his shoulder as he carried her through the silent halls of the house. Nothing ever made a noise in this house after they went to bed. Tris was an expert now at moving noiselessly and like every night, he made sure to stop by every partially opened door on his way to the library. Checking on his sisters, peering through the door at them both; Caroline was asleep under her bed, as usual, and Alyssa was barely visible under the pile of stuffed toys she insisted upon keeping on her bed—so none felt left out. Snoring could be heard from both, and the digital clock on the bed-stand read 01:21. Mia smiled and didn’t make a sound. She understood the night.

His parents next. He had to be _extra_ careful here. But they were both asleep, his dad snuggled up close in his mom’s arms. Tris looked at them through the open door, the dim light that was always on in their room lighting up the peaceful expression on Mom’s sleeping face, and felt funny and tight in his chest. It was weird, seeing how obviously they _loved_ each other. Mia patted his cheek, shaking her head restlessly. Blonde curls drifted about, nothing like his brown hair that was exactly like his dad’s and his sisters, or like Olivia’s spiky black hair.

He didn’t check on Olivia. He’d have to climb the attic ladder to get up there, and sometimes she booby trapped it. Instead, he went to the library, closed the door, and put his sister into the nest of cushions and blankets he’d made for her, and then began to read. And she listened.

He loved her absolutely.

 

* * *

 

It was daytime, almost evening, but the house was silent. Tristan yawned, letting his book thump his knee and listening for noise outside the library. Mia was quietly eating a banana he’d given her in her blanket nest, mushing it between her fingers into a gross mess of white goo. Above their heads, Olivia’s music thumped. Lys and Cary weren’t home, both out at after school curriculars, and Mom had had to go into work for some reason, despite a mean cold she was nursing. Dad had driven her, stating something about her cognitive functions being impaired.

“Just you and me, Kitten,” he told his sister seriously, deciding to teach her about fixed vs. growth mindsets today, and steadfastly ignoring his oldest sister’s distant presence. Besides, he had _no_ doubt that Mom and Dad would leave him with Mia, even if just for a little while. He was completely trustworthy. “Want to learn?”

“Ba,” she said, and sneezed banana. He sighed, and went to find a damp washcloth to wipe banana-spit from his book.

When he came back, she was staring curiously at the banana peel. Crouching next to her, he wiped her fingers and then found her favourite book. It wasn’t _his_ favourite book, far too kiddy, but he was okay with reading a kiddy book for an actual kid. And she liked pointing to the animals.

“Where’s the baboon?” he asked, opening the children’s picture encyclopedia to the relevant page and holding it front. “Ba-boon, Mia.”

“Ba-ba,” she said, which was close enough at her level of development, and pointed in the rough general direction of the baboon. Or possibly the elephant. He cheered anyway, and she clapped in delight at getting it right. “Okay, now the lion. Li-on. Where is it?”

“Ba-ba,” she repeated, and pointed to the baboon again. Well, one out of two wasn’t too bad… he yayed anyway.

“Okay, now the toucan,” he said, a harder one. She blinked and did nothing, frowning a little. “Here, look at my hand. Tou-can.” He pointed, waiting for her gaze to follow his finger. It didn’t. She stared at a point on his chest, mouth slipping open a little. “Kitten?”

Silence.

His heart thumped with a shaky, unsteady beat. That wasn’t right. She _never_ ignored him. “Mia?” he asked again, and touched her shoulder. She slumped against his hand, falling back.

He caught her as she began to twitch, and then he picked her up and ran, screaming for Olivia.

 

* * *

 

Jack was rambling happily about his day at school when the phone rang, silencing him abruptly. Hotch winced at the sharp look the phone got, knowing his son was already dreading hearing JJ’s grim, “We’ve got a case.”

But it wasn’t JJ.

_Reid home calling._

“Hotchner,” Hotch answered, glancing up at the clock. “Is there something—”

“Uncle Aaron?” The voice was young, panicked, and female. “Is that you?”

“Olivia?” Hotch looked at Jack, who must have recognised his expression somehow, reaching for the stovetop and turning their pasta to _off_ before going for the car-keys. He wasn’t sure when his son had learned ‘emergency procedure’ by osmosis, but he was glad of it. “What’s wrong?”

If he’d ever doubted Olivia was Emily Prentiss in miniature, he never did again. She was scared but calm and had a plan from the moment he’d answered the phone.

The three Reid-Prentiss children were already out the front of the house when Hotch pulled up, Mia bundled up in Tristan’s arms and Olivia holding a car-seat. Jack was out of the car in a heartbeat, before Hotch even, grabbing the car-seat from Olivia and darting to install it. Hotch made a mental note to tell his son just how proud of him he was when he had the chance, before crouching down in front of the tear-streaked Tristan.

“She wouldn’t stop shaking,” Olivia said. “And she couldn’t _hear_ us, and Mom and Dad’s cells are both going straight to voicemail and we didn’t know who to call and—”

“It was a seizure,” Tristan burst out with. “Complex partial, I _know_ it was. I’ve read about them, a lot! She could have _more_ , we have to take her to the hospital!”

“Da,” Mia mewled, wiggling miserably in Tristan’s arms and reaching for Hotch. He took her carefully, seeing no sluggishness in her responses, her pupil dilation normal. Gut knotting tightly at his co-workers’ failures to answer their cells—they simply _wouldn’t_ , not with their children home alone—he cuddled her close and made soothing noises to stall the hiccupping tears he could feeling oncoming as her chest hitched.

“I’m going to take her to ER to get checked out,” he said firmly, standing back up and rocking her a little to keep her calm. Olivia was barely an inch away from tears herself, despite her firm hand on the situation, and Tristan _was_ crying now. “There’s room for you guys. Come on, we’ll call your parents from the car.”

“We _can’t_ ,” Olivia whimpered, hugging her arms around herself. Her makeup was smearing as the tears escaped. “Our sisters might be home soon and they’ll worry if we’re not here. Tristan should go, I’ll stay. And if our parents come home to us gone…”

“I’ll stay with her, Dad,” Jack said firmly, stepping past and wrapping his arm around his friend’s shoulders, tugging her in for a hug. A typical Reid, she was almost as lanky as him despite the two-years difference in age, having to duck her head to sniff against his shirt. “Are you going to stay, Tris?”

Hotch already knew the answer to that, seeing Tris shake his head resolutely. “I’m coming,” he said, bolting to the car.

“Good work, Jack,” Hotch said quietly, before shifting Mia to one arm and touching Olivia’s elbow with his free hand. “And you, Livy. You did great. Your parents will be proud.”

They both nodded, watching as he strode to the car with Mia in his arms, desperately hoping that her parents were okay.

 

* * *

 

She’d excused herself from the complicated medical argument happening in the blank-walled room, leaving Spencer and the doctor with Mia sitting placidly on Spencer’s knee. Mia watched her leave but Emily smiled at her on the way out, not letting an iota of her shock or guilt seep through. Tristan was sitting in the foyer, huddled up next to Hotch with his head against his shoulder. Emily paused, studying them both. Hotch looking drained; Tristan was clearly asleep.

“How is he?” she asked, walking over and wondering if Hotch could see the potential diagnosis etched into her face or in the shape of her eyes. He certainly studied her as closely as though he could.

“Scared,” Hotch said finally. They hadn’t had a chance to talk about the terrible moment Hotch had finally gotten through to them—damn car had broken down in a fucking _tunnel_ , leaving them both stranded with no cell reception—informing them that he was in the hospital with two of their children. “He’s worried he did something to cause the seizures. I assured him he certainly didn’t, but I think he really needs to hear it from you.”

Emily looked at her son and the sticky trail of dry tears on his cheeks. “They think it’s epilepsy,” she whispered, and hated everything. Hated her fucking age and the preterm birth and anything that might have caused this to her baby, her helpless tiny baby who had no idea what was happening. “It… it’s probably going to happen again. It’s… my fault. I was too _old_ , Aaron, too fucking old and…”

“Oh, Em,” said a soft voice from behind her. She turned, horrified someone had heard her, and found Rossi standing behind her with a coffee in either hand. The coffees were placed firmly on a coffee-table, and then he was hugging her. “Nonsense. Absolute nonsense. These things just _happen_ , and then we deal with it. Just like your champion children dealt with it today, got it?” She let herself be hugged and then pulled away, his hands still on her arms. Studying her closely, he used a finger to gently wipe a single tear from her cheek. “And just like them, we don’t get mad about a few tears, okay?”

“Mom?” rasped Tristan from behind them, his voice thick with sleep and tears. Emily pulled out of Rossi’s arms, turning and catching her son as he threw himself at her. “Is Mia okay? Is she gonna be?”

“She’s fine, she’s fine,” Emily soothed, hugging him tight and putting her own insecurities aside. “And baby, you did so well. So, so well. We’re so proud of you. And we love you so much.”

“Thanks, Mom,” Tristan mumbled into her arm, snuggling close like he probably wouldn’t in a few years, once his clever, sweet brain got all hormonal and realized how lame parents were. “Love you, too.”

 

* * *

 

Neither of them could sleep, even as Mia curled up happily between them with her arms wrapped around a stuffed rabbit Spencer had bought her from a toy store on the way home from the hospital. Neither could sleep, and as soon as Spencer had slid into the bed beside them, the day had hit him. He’d been a rock until now, steady during the wild drive to the hospital, calm as they’d talked to Hotch, firm when discussing treatment options with the doctors. But he slid into bed, the night closing in around their silent home, and he broke. She held him against her chest just like she’d held Tristan earlier that day, cradling his head and shoulders and letting him sob noiselessly into her shirt. She was all cried out. His turn now.

It was honestly heartbreaking, how good he was at crying without making any noise. If it wasn’t for the slow heave of his breathing against her body and the humid dampness to his hidden face, she’d have thought he was simply cuddling close. A practised habit, and damn if that didn’t make her cling harder, her eyes locked on the possessive curl of his hand over Mia’s chubby arm.

What could she say that he didn’t know? That they’d get through this? He knew that. That wasn’t why he was crying. He was crying because their child was hurting, and there was very little they could do to stop it. And it would happen again. They’d be just as helpless then. And this was the coming to terms with that; with knowing that even big, complicated brains like Tristan’s and Spencer’s or even sneakily creative brains like Olivia’s or Alyssa’s couldn’t think of ways out of it. And then there was Caroline, their out of the box thinker, who hadn’t said a word. Just kissed her baby sister and then crept away to her room, huddled on her bed with a sketchpad and earbuds in, closing out the world.

Spencer made a low sound, a sigh mixed with a moan, and she knew he was done. But he stayed still, pressed to her with his head tilted around slightly so he could breathe, and she looked down and studied the shape of his cheek and the bright glint of tears on his lashes.

“I love you,” she told him firmly, and eased him up to find his lips. They kissed damply and he tasted of salt, and she thought maybe that this was the dark side of loving a living thing so intently. This vulnerable pain.

“Love you exponentially more,” he mumbled against her mouth, drawing away and looking down at Mia. She watched as he shuffled down, curling around their tiny daughter and pressing his mouth to her flushed cheek. And he lay there, silently savouring her.

“Mama?” whispered the doorway, and Emily twitched and turn to find Cary standing there, Alyssa pressed against her back. They were dressed in their nighties, feet bare, brown hair tangled and wild. Four hazel eyes studied her, all of them overbright.

They were holding hands.

“Tristan is sneaking again and he said Dad’s crying,” Cary said, stepping forward.

“Sorry to interrupt,” mumbled Alyssa, but then the darkness moved against and Olivia was there. Dark haired and dark eyed, she looked oddly ghostlike without the makeup she’d started wearing like a mask against her own indecisiveness.

“I’m not sorry,” she said decisively. “I want to sleep in here tonight. Dad is sad.”

“I’m fine, sweethearts,” Spencer replied, but his voice was fucked and cracking. Olivia rolled her eyes at him, well used to his tricks, and walked forward to climb into bed beside them. Without a word, she huddled up behind him and wrapped her arms around his stomach, holding him close. The girls followed, tangling together over Emily’s legs and clinging to her and each other equally.

“You gotta let us,” Cary said.

Alyssa added smugly, “Yeah, otherwise we’ll get in here anyway, you know that. You can’t stop us.”

“She’s right,” said Tristan, appearing in the doorway. Unlike the others, he looked completely well-presented. Hair combed neatly and flannel pyjamas as neat and tidy as one of Hotch’s suits, he folded his hands and looked uncertain. “Unconditional love is integral to creating secure attachments, and if you turn us away it could have permanent effects on our ability to form relationships.”

Emily laughed. She couldn’t help it.

Damn this weirdass family.

“Get in here,” she told him, and Tristan didn’t wait to be asked again. He snuggled in, rearranged the blankets so the girls were covered at the foot as well, and appeared to fall immediately asleep. Emily studied him, whispered, _I love you_ , and wasn’t at all surprised when five voices immediately responded with much the same. When she looked back at Spencer, he was almost asleep and smiling. And she wouldn’t swap this for anything in the world, explosions and evil masterminds and all of it. The good and the bad.

It was all equally as important in making them _this._


	10. April 10th: A Snuppy Puppy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Maxim Monday – **E. M. Forster, _Maurice_** – _“I swear from the bottom of my heart I want to be healed. I want to be like other men, not this outcast whom nobody wants.”_

Tristan wasn’t the type to be melodramatic or manipulative, so when he rocketed into the study and desperately asked where his dad was, Emily was slightly more concerned than if it had been Lys or Cary. Passionately overexcitable was usually their forte.

JJ paused, eyes skittering from Emily to Tris, and Emily lowered her coffee warily. “He has his conference this weekend,” she reminded him, and saw his face go from hopeful to crushed in a heartbeat. “Why?”

“He _can’t_ ,” Tristan burst out with. “He has to come home! It has to be this weekend or they’ll be _gone_.”

“Tris…?” Emily leaned forward. “What’s going on?”

Tristan breathed deeply, shoving his hand into his pockets. Emily heard paper crunching. For a long moment, it looked like he wasn’t going to tell her. Heart sinking, she tried not to be hurt about that. Unfortunately, Spencer’s leniency led to her playing bad cop more often than good… she guessed that this was more of a ‘gotta ask the soft parent’ situation.

“Actually…” Tris said, shoulders straightening. Suddenly confident again, she blinked as he went from reticent and worried to assured once more, sadly not a common look on him. “… maybe… Mom, can we go for a drive? Please? It’s not far, I _promise_.”

He looked plaintive. Damnit.

Kid had learned how to plead from the best.

“I’ll watch the kids if you need,” JJ said, glancing out the window to where Henry and the girls were happily building _something_ in the backyard, Mia watching them curiously from her seat on the lawn. “It sounds important.”

“It’s infinitesimally important!” Tristan almost bounced as he said this.

“Okay,” she said, because shit, Tristan rarely asked for anything, so it must be somewhat important. “But quickly. Auntie JJ can’t be here all night.”

“Thanks Auntie JJ!” Tristan yelled, hurtling from the room.

“Thanks, JJ,” Emily added, following. “Let’s hope he’s not about to show me something he has his heart set on. I didn’t schedule in ‘dream-crushing’ today.”

JJ snorted. “Ahh, but spontaneity is important to a little bit of dream-crushing. And I’m sure you won’t, Em. Don’t be so hard on yourself.”

Emily wasn’t sure she was right there. Since when was she _ever_ the parent who got to do the fun things?

 

* * *

 

Spencer got home and the house was silent. Almost silent. There were gasps and giggles coming from the kitchen. Wary, because he knew his family and silent was _never_ good, Spencer put his bag down and snuck through to look through the sliding doors at the array of bowed heads all peering down with barely contained excitement at…

He froze. “Emily,” he murmured, seeing his wife twitch guiltily and look around at him. “What is that.”

Alyssa answered. “Duh, Dad,” she said with a roll of her eyes. “It’s clearly a dog.”

“Baby dog,” Mia confirmed, patting the back of the half-grown German Shepherd flopped across her legs chewing on a stuffed owl. “Dad, is it ours? For always?”

“I thought we said no dogs.” Spencer didn’t mean for the snap in his voice, but this wasn’t something they’d agreed to, or even discussed recently, and when he had considered a pet, it wasn’t a _big_ dog. Dogs didn’t like him. No dogs liked him. And a—

“Walk,” Emily said, taking his hand and leading him from the room. “If you freak you’ll upset Tristan. Don’t worry, nothing is set in stone.” The doors slid shut between them and the children busily forming _really fast_ attachments to the animal who wasn’t set in stone, and he groaned when he imagined the bevy of sad faces that would be aimed their way if they took the animal back to where it came from. “Spence, look.”

He looked. She was holding a drawing, a child’s drawing. “What is this?” he said, taking it. _MiA egg 4_ was written wonkily across the top. _To Triss_. “Mia drew this?” He squinted at it.

“It’s our family,” Emily said quietly, pointing. “Here’s us, hugging apparently. Cary and Lys and Olivia are here. And Tris is this square looking person here—I think the glasses threw her a little. See what’s missing?”

He scanned it. “Mia. She’s here?” he questioned, finding the smallest circle person shoved up against the corner of the page, half smooshed against the edge, and far from everyone else. “I’m not sure I understand…”

“Tristan asked her why she was all the way over there and she said it’s because that’s where she goes,” Emily explained, and Spencer felt her shudder. “The preschool _and_ her kindergarten have both apparently been telling her that she has to stay in a special spot, by the teachers. Not with the other children. Where they can respond in the event of another seizure on the premises, after the last time…”

“She’s internalizing that as meaning that she doesn’t belong,” Spencer realized out loud, his heart sinking. _Oh, Mia…_ “What does the dog have to do with it?”

“Tristan’s idea,” Emily said, the sadness vanishing for a heartbeat and being replaced with pride. “Oh, Spence, he went out and asked around at all the kennels for trainers who specialize in _seizure assist_ dogs. He checked their accreditations, their references, everything. He has a whole file in there, referenced and everything, before he found one of the best passing through DC today. And fucking sidelined me with it, I had no idea what I was walking into, but apparently he’s been talking to the guy for months. And paid a deposit to let us bring the pup home today to meet Mia as a ‘introductory session’. The trainer was here, he’s left to allow us time to get to know the pup.”

“How…” Spencer reeled, not entirely shocked that his son had been this clever but completely poleaxed by how _sneaky_ he’d been about it.

Eyebrows up, now his wife looked amused. “He’s been charging his classmates to do their assignments, depending on the grade they want. We’re probably going to have to correct that behaviour, by the way, but he’s made a _mint_ from it.”

Spencer thought about all of this. Approaching it from every angle. If Mia felt like her epilepsy isolated her now, that would only increase once her peers were old enough to realize there were things she couldn’t do with them. If they were going to head that off now, she needed…

She’d need her independence, especially since none of the medication regimes they’d tried were doing more than simply _reducing_ the number of seizures. They couldn’t hover over her like they had for the past year a half, making sure she was never out of sight, checking in on her babysitters every hour.

“I want to conduct my own review of Tris’ work,” he said finally. “And speak to the trainer, who is likely going to want to see how we all interact with the animal before agreeing to a sale. And we’re going to need to discuss with the others that the animal is _Mia’s_ dog, and that they have to respect the need for her to bond exclusively with it.”

“Is that a…” Emily looked tense. He smiled; she never trusted her own instincts about the big decisions. And he regretted his prior reaction—this was _good_.

“Yes,” he said, pulling her close and brushing his lips against her forehead. “It’s very likely a yes. We’ve never been the types of parents who clip their children’s wings—this will ensure that Mia has the same opportunities as the others do. Oh, Tristan might very well be the _cleverest_.”

“Don’t tell him that,” she warned him. “Alyssa will start oxidising his socks again.”

Three months later, Snuppy came home for good. No one would claim credit for the name. Spencer, finding a book on the history of cloning shoved underneath Tristan’s bed, had his suspicions.

And their family grew by just one more.


	11. April 11th: A Wondering Smile

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Tonal Tuesday – **Dreamy** – The tone is pensive, introspective, possibly quixotic. Why are we wistfully wondering?_

There was a point beyond tired. A bone-deep, soul-sucking exhaustion that grabbed at every part of her and hauled her down; her eyes gritty and swollen, refusing to stay open. She was pretty sure she’d started drooling, and even her eyelashes felt sleepy. It was beyond tired, and she didn’t even know what day it was anymore or if there were still days or if she’d been sucked into a vortex of doing nothing but being tits on legs for the voracious appetites of three relentless mouths.

Well, two relentless mouths, and Tristan. Who ate about as much as his father did, to her horror.

“Has he nursed?” she meant to say, but instead made a kind of _guh_ noise and floated off into her head somewhere. Sprawled on the bed with a clock ticking nearby and the birds outside screaming awake the early morning, Cary had woken up screeching and brought the other two to life with her. _I’ll feed them,_ Emily had said, and now she wasn’t sure where she was or what was happening.

Maybe Spencer replied. Maybe he didn’t. Emily might not have said anything at all. Instead, she closed her eyes and… just drifted. Drifted past that point of bone-deep tired and into a wistful kind of nothingness where she was distantly aware of Spencer’s heartbeat by her ear, his warm body along her left side as he cradled her upright. Slightly more aware of the slight weights of a baby on either side of her body, propped by pillows and nursing happily with soft little sounds of satisfaction. At one point, she might have heard a piping voice calling _Mommy_. And she drifted.

When she opened her eyes, feeling more dead than alive, there was only one baby on her chest. Fast asleep and snoring with her little mouth open, the red bracelet on her wrist declared that it was Caroline. Emily blinked. Counted twice, just to be sure, wondered if she hallucinated giving birth to three babies—trying to move upright answered that question as the barely healed C-section scar twinged painfully—and then turned her head to the steady presence of Spencer at her side. His voice rumbled softly. Even in this blurry confusion of not being quite sure if she was awake or this was a dream, she could hear him. Reciting some complicated psychological theory to stay awake, his voice rough and hoarse. And then she blinked and the room was lighter and there was one more in their crowded bed.

“Tilt the bottle a little more, that’s right,” Spencer was saying, and Emily’s breath caught as Livy obeyed. “See. There we go.”

“He’s hungry,” Livy giggled, and Spencer shifted around with Alyssa in his arms. “Look at him eat. He’s gonna get big.”

“Yeah, he is,” said Spencer, and smiled. Emily watched that smile. It was dreamy, half-asleep, more than a little impractical. And even if it was a dream, she fell a little more in love with him in that moment. 


	12. April 12th: An Impossible Task

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Wordsmith Wednesday – **Idiosyncratic** – “Pertaining to the nature of idiosyncrasy, or something peculiar to an individual.”_

This assignment was bizarre.

“Write down one idiosyncrasy for each of your family members,” Cary read slowly. “Huh.”

She went to Tristan first, bursting into his room without knocking. Despite it being two p.m., he was still asleep. Despite him still being asleep, he rocketed upright like a cat and stared at her with wide, blank eyes. She knew he wasn’t proper awake yet, amusing herself by flicking the light switch on and off and on and off and on and off until he blinked and went, “Carawha’?”

“What’s idiosyncrasy mean?” she asked him.

He answered immediately, fumbling for his glasses as he spoke: “Pertaining to the nature of idiosyncrasy, or something peculiar to an individual. A quirk, basically.”

“Oh.” She looked again at the assignment, tapping her pen on it. “Do we have quirks?”

“What do you think?” Tristan groaned, and rolled back into bed. Since he was being unhelpful, Cary went to find someone who _would_ help.

Lys was crying in the kitchen. “What’s wrong with you?” Cary asked her. Without answering, Lys just kept crying, all pale and shaking, but not in the way that meant she was upset, just like she’d had a shock or something. And there was only _one_ thing Lys was scared of in the whole world. “Was there another whale on TV?”

“They’re so big!” Lys howled, sobbing more. “How are they so big! Don’t they _care_ that they could eat us?”

“Now, now,” Dad said, appearing with a wet wash cloth and a frown. “Most whales could absolutely not eat you. Most of them have far too small of a throat to swallow a human.”

“Really?” whimpered Lys.

Dad paused. “Well, killer whales, but they’re not really—”

Lys began to scream more. Cary decided that maybe she’d ask later about idiosyncrasies, walking away as Dad muttered, “This was why I told Emily not to buy Finding Nemo...”

She tried Olivia next. “Can you help me with my homework?” she asked, popping her head up into Olivia’s room. And blinking. “Woah. What are those?”

“Fairy lights,” Olivia answered from within a nest of wire and oddly shaped bulbs, a psychology textbook propped up on one side and a forensics book on the other. In her hands, she was holding a book on bantam hens, staring unblinkingly at Cary.

“Oh.” Cary looked around. “Why aren’t they making any light?”

Olivia raised an eyebrow. Cary thought of telling that she looked like Mom when she did that, then decided against it. “Because they’re black?” she answered slowly. “Duh.”

“Oh,” said Cary again. “Can you help me with my homework?”

“No.” Olivia turned on her stereo. Someone began talking in a funny accent, before repeating the words in English. Even in English, Cary didn’t understand them. Something about psychoanalysis. “I’m doing homework. Studying psychology in Spanish helps me remember.”

That made sense. “What language is forensics?” she asked curiously, writing down on her notebook next to the line labelled _Olivia_ : _‘likes the colour black which is weird because it’s a shade not a colour and also it’s not very creative._ ’

“Greek.”

Cool. “What about bantam hens?” Cary asked finally. She’d have to find Mom.

“Russian,” said Olivia. “Now go away.” She added something in Russian that Cary didn’t understand, but she went away anyway. Before she got downstairs, Mom rushed past swearing loudly.

“Hey, Olivia knows that word,” Cary said brightly. Mom stopped, turning and raising _both_ her eyebrows. Uh oh.

“Does she now?” Mom said. Double uh oh. Before Cary could distract her by raising her basically not even began homework, there was a boom from out the back. “Oh _motherballs_ ,” Mom snapped. “Spencer!”

“Alyssa’s blown up the shed again,” came the shout, and running feet. “She’s okay!”

“I’m okay!” Alyssa added. “Oh no. Oh no!”

Another boom. Mom went for the fire extinguisher. Cary sighed, and went to trudge out the front to tell the neighbours everything was okay. “Third time this month,” said Old Mr. Peters. “You kids are gonna hurt yourselves one day,” said his wife. Cary just smiled and nodded and ate the dry cookies they gave her while Dad talked to the fire warden across the street. Cary scowled, looking down at her book.

She was _never_ gonna get her homework done. This assignment was _impossible_.

Her family was just so painfully _normal._


	13. April 13th: A Terrifying Climb

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Typecast Thursday – **Wicked** – She’s a witch, but maybe not so wicked. Turn this tale as old as time into something a little fresher._

Cary never cried. She was the baby they’d found last, tucked up between her siblings in the womb and patiently pretending she wasn’t there. When she was born, she continued being quietly observant. There were days that Emily would find herself feeding Tristan and Alyssa in the nursery and she’d look up to see Cary watching her with wide hazel eyes, almost smiling.

It was a little unnerving. But then again, no matter how many babies Emily dealt with on a daily basis, they were _all_ a little unnerving, in their own ways. Olivia still recreated crime scenes, after all.

As soon as Cary learned to crawl, she learned to hide. It took two months to adjust to the panic of walking out and finding the playpen containing only two babies when it should have contained three. It took another month after that for Spencer to compile a list of ‘possible Cary hideaways’ and mark all of them with a sign hanging over-top stating _‘may contain infant; do not panic_ ’. Every crib they had, she escaped. High chairs, strollers, even once—and Emily only found out about this _after_ —escaping from the clothes basket Olivia had put on top of her and sat on. Under the couch, behind the fridge, kitchen cupboards; if she could fit in there, she would.

When she learned to walk, she apparently also learned to fly.

“She might be a witch,” Spencer remarked glumly, as Emily watched him attempting to fetch down their giggling two-year-old from the porch roof before the neighbours saw and called CPS. Heart in her mouth and every instinct screaming at her not to look at the wobbly baby leaning over the guttering to smile innocently at Emily as Spencer edged warily from the window down to her, Emily couldn’t answer that frankly insane proposition. Ten minutes later, with both baby and husband safely down and being fussed over, he said, “The window was _locked_. Cary, what were you _doing_?”

“Up,” Cary replied seriously.   

“She’s not a witch, Spencer,” Emily scolded. Cary giggled, and then spent the next ten years proving Emily wrong.


	14. April 14th: This Rightful Wrong

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Fiendish Friday – **Aaaaaaaaa –** No As about it: today you cannot use the letter A._

When Spencer turned eleven, he thought he’d be lonely forever. There were books, things to study; possibly it wouldn’t be too terrible… but he didn’t relish the thought.

When Emily turned eleven, she thought she’d be content to be by herself forever. But when Spencer turned twenty-four and Emily slightly older, they found out just how wrong they were.

They never regretted it.


	15. April 15th: A First Holiday

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Snapshot Saturday – **Drive –** Image Prompt_
> 
> ** **

**03:31**

On the morning of their first holiday with the _whole_ family, the alarms went off dead on time. Tristan, sitting in the library with his nose in a book on _The History of Verbs_ , heard three alarms shrill. He also heard, almost simultaneously, the thump of Olivia’s alarm being thrown from her bedside cupboard, a suspicious _boom_ from the girls’ room, and his own alarm humming in his pocket. He switched it off and listened for what he wasn’t hearing. Then he sighed, and went to wake his parents.

**03:35**

Spencer woke to Tristan poking him in the arm with _The History of Verbs._ The clock read 00:35.

“Lys changed your clock,” Tristan informed him loudly. Too loud. There was a sharp cry of _Tristan_! from the staircase. “It’s time to get up.” Within the hour, Emily had banned all mentions of _snitches get stitches_ and had also had to rescue Tristan twice from having the contents of his suitcase replaced with spiders. Where the spiders came from, they never did find out.

**03:41**

They attempted to get Olivia up. “We’re leaving at five on the dot,” Spencer warned her. She burrowed deeper under her covers and grumbled, ignoring him grabbing her by the ankles and trying to physically haul her from the bed. “Hmm,” said Spencer, and reconsidered his approach.

Downstairs, Emily was warning the rest of the group as she fed Mia cereal: “Make sure you have everything. We’re not going to turn back once we’re on the road.”

The triplets all rolled their eyes and said, “Yes, Mom.”

Emily silently planned for all least two return trips for things that had been forgotten, right as Mia tried to give Snuppy some cereal and accidentally toppled the bowl onto his head. He didn’t seem to mind.

**03:50**

Screams came from Olivia’s room. The rest of the family paused.

Spencer appeared. “Olivia’s awake,” he said cheerfully, and went to pack the car.

**05:00**

They left. Emily was nothing if not punctual.

**05:07**

They’re back. The children were nothing if not predictable.

**05:35**

They’re back again because Cary was carsick on the dog and caused a chain reaction in everyone else in the car. The only happy one was the dog, and Mia, who was never really unhappy.

**06:00**

“I swear to god, this is the last time we’re leaving,” Emily warned her freshly showered brood, making eye contact with each and every one of them in the car. “Now. Are we ready to go?”

“Yes, Mom,” they all murmured miserably.

**06:13**

“I’ve forgotten my wallet,” said Spencer.

Emily considered divorce.


	16. April 16th: A Rabbity Kiss

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Scenic Sunday – **Egg Hunt** – Your character falls and finds more than just chocolate when they land. They probably shouldn’t have found it. They don’t really regret finding it._

Mia trotted into the kitchen with three Tupperware containers in her arms, Snuppy padding placidly after her, and absolutely covered in mud.

“Hi, Mia,” said Henry from where he was painting a perfect Iron Man design on a hollowed eggshell.

“What happened to you?” Tristan asked. Without asking, he nudged a chair out so she could scramble up and drop her haul onto the table, reaching a dirty hand out for one of the eggshells Tristan was carefully trying to paint on. Not very well. Cary should probably be doing this, but she was out hunting chocolate so the job had fallen to him and Henry.

“I fell,” Mia chirped cheerfully, wiping her hand across her face and leaving a long black streak on her cheek. “Almost into the creek. It was _fun_. And look how many eggs I found! Would you like some?”

Tristan looked. He’d been the first of the triplets to clue into the lie that was the existence of the Easter Bunny, purely because of their father’s germophobic insistence of putting every chocolate egg into a container before hiding it to avoid them getting gross. Tristan _seriously_ doubted a rabbit had a conscious understanding of hygiene.

“Thanks,” Henry said brightly, taking a chocolate and eating it happily without his mom there to make noises at him for eating too much chocolate. Tristan shook his head. He didn’t really _like_ chocolate.

“Guess what else I found?” Mia broke the hollow eggshell she was holding with a soft _oops_ , hiding it under the tablemat.

“What?” Tristan asked without really listening, reaching for a dye-covered cloth to hand to Mia to wipe her muddy mouth with, turning her lips green instead. Henry giggled.

Mia beamed. “I saw,” she whispered intently, peering around to make sure no one was looking, “ _I saw Olivia kissing the Easter Bunny.”_

Tristan broke his eggshell.  What?

“What?” he asked, blinking. Mia just smiled, nodded, and rubbed more green across her face. “By the creek?”

“Yup.” Mia nodded seriously. “Do you think he’s gonna give her all the good chocolate now? That’s not fair. Maybe I should kiss him too.”

“Uh,” said Henry, eyes all big. “Tris… isn’t _Jack_ dressed as the Easter Bunny today?”

Tristan groaned. “Gross!” him and Henry said as one. What a traitor! He added, “Bet he’s just doing it for more chocolate.” After all, why _else_ would someone kiss his sister?


	17. April 17th: A Lonely Corner

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Maxim Monday – **Alfred Austin** – “Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are.”_

David Rossi was a writer and all writers were, in their heart of hearts, a bit pretentious. Every last one of them. It was the words that did it. They got all big and tangled up in writerly brains, turning something as simple as snowfall into something that took seven paragraphs and the abolition of grammar to describe.

He knew this. He accepted this. He took his alcohol fine, his clothes finer, and he’d planted white asphodel in the shaded corner of his sprawling gardens where no one went because he never let them. His gardeners weren’t even permitted past the small wire gate. Long cases in summer usually meant the death of whatever other plants he’d popped into the scrubby dirt back there, but the asphodel had never died.

And wasn’t that fucking poetic.

No. No one was allowed back there. And no one _went_ back there.

No one until Olivia fucking Prentiss-Reid.

“You,” Rossi said, when he saw the half-open gate and stalled his thumping heart long enough to follow the bratty little toddler through it, “are your mother’s daughter. She always fuc—runs off as well. Never naked though, unfortunately. Wouldn’t that be a sight.”

Livy looked up at him from where she was kneeling in the dirt in front of the tufted flower, mud on her nose and leaves in her hair and naked as a goddamn babe in the woods. And this was why he never babysat. Damn babies worked out how to walk and then took off as soon as you turned your back on them to make sure the bathwater was only running warm.

“What dis?” Livy asked, touched the white flower with delicate care for such a fierce little face such as hers.

“Plant,” Rossi said sharply, regretting his sharpness when the wee lass’s face crumpled a little. Wrapping the towel around her—regretting that he’d grabbed a white one—he hefted her out of the dirt and a few of the petals followed, wrapped around her grubby fingers. “Asphodel. You can wrap cheese with it.”

“Yum,” Livy said, kicking her legs and settling into the towel as he carried her from that shaded nook. And then, with careless direction for a three-and-a-half-year-old, she added, “Why is it alone?”

Ouch.

_Ouch_.

“Because it needs to be,” Rossi answered, and tapped his fingers against her face. “Got your nose. Gonna eat it. What are you going to do then?”

“Tell Dad!” she threatened. “He’ll getcha!” Thoroughly distracted by the theft of such an important facial feature, Prentiss’s canny little daughter didn’t ask about the asphodel again.

When she was six, he babysat her once more. This time, she was old enough to follow him around the garden as he pottered about. Thankfully not saddled with the _entire_ Prentiss-Reid clan—and chuckling slightly at just how impressively virile that pair had turned out to be once they’d started spawning—he showed her how to tell if tomatoes were ripe and how to transplant roses without getting pricked by the thorns and found her a thoroughly attentive little apprentice.

“What’s in there?” she asked, when she saw the gate. Above it, the white petals of the asphodel were just visible. “What’s that big flower? Is it smelly? Can I lick it?”

He hesitated. She wasn’t three anymore, and her eyes were sharp, her mind sharper. Her mother’s daughter, sure, but her father’s brain ticked behind those dark eyes and darker smile.

“White asphodel,” he said finally, throwing caution to the wind. “You can wrap cheese with it.”

She blinked, and then looked at him with her mother’s eyes. “But _why_?” she asked once more. “You’ve got it all locked away alone. Doesn’t it get sad? Doesn’t it get lonely? Dad says plants like music. I like music. So they must _feel_. I feel. Would you lock me up alone?”

She babbled, as kids did, and Rossi stared down at her. “Want to plant your own garden?” he asked roughly, once again distracting her.

That lasted all of the next six years.

“Uncle Dave,” she called, when she was thirteen-years-old and there by choice now instead of necessity. “Look at this book.”

He looked. _The Language of Flowers._ He bet Tristan had given it to her, the studious little weirdo, unless Reid was hardcore into flowers. “Interesting,” he said, and went back to dragging the potting mix across the lawn to her little plot of pentas and purple petunias. It was a strange dark splash of deep purple and pink flowers right smack bang in the middle of his summer roses, but he wouldn’t have it any other way.

“It says here that moonflower means dreaming of love. And it says that daffodils mean new beginnings. We should plant some daffodils, can we? And maybe some rainflowers. They’re really pretty. Look.”

He looked. “You hate daffodils,” he said instead of committing, eyeing the way she’d tied her curly hair back behind her ears, sitting on the lawn in overalls with the book on her knees. Too innocent for his liking. Too Reid-like when he knew she was being Prentissy right now, and coming at him with an angle. “And where would we plant these flowers you hate?”

Dark eyes watched him, and then cut to the rusted gate and the white flowers now tumbling over it. Overgrown and underappreciated. “Perhaps in there,” she said softly, and he swallowed down everything he might have said.

“Why?” he asked again. Damn Reid. Damn Prentiss. Making stupid adorable children and then giving the care of those stupid adorable children to others without warning them how fucking _smart_ they could be.

“Daffodils, new beginnings,” she murmured, tracing the words with her fingers. She’d painted her nails black and now wore chunky bangles that thumped around a thin wrist. Barely on the cusp of finding herself. He dreaded puberty; dreaded losing _this._ “Rainflowers can mean… I will never forget you.”

_Thump_ went his heart. Stupid clever children. Stupid David Rossi.

Stupid rusted gate with the squeaking hinges that had suddenly stopped squeaking like someone had been sneaking in there. Stupid rock under the stupid pretentious flower he’d planted. Stupid guest bedroom that she’d somehow claimed as her own, popping in at least once a month with a cheerful, _hi Uncle Rossi, what’s for dinner?_

“Asphodel,” she continued, and he closed his eyes and breathed slowly. “ _My regrets follow you to the grave_.”

“’I had buried my romance in a field of asphodel,’” Rossi muttered. She said nothing. She knew she had him. “Does your father know you’re a little bit of a shit, Livy?”

“He pretends not to,” she replied, and smiled.

She’d get her way. The gate would be opened, the white asphodel surrounded by the rainflowers and the daffodils and a single Canterbury bells bush he picked himself. _Gratitude._ And the flowers would grow, eventually covering the rock below the asphodel until all that could be seen was the top and the line _In memory of my lost._

The corner was never lonely again.


	18. April 18th: A Single Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Tonal Tuesday – **Amorous** – The tone is ardently tender… possibly romantic, or maybe a one night stand. Are we enamoured tonight or heading for a cold let-down?_

“We’re getting old,” Emily said glumly, kicking the sheets off the bed and arching her back like a cat, sore and old and tired and old and— “Speak for yourself,” Spencer replied, coming up behind her and tucking in close, knees on the sheets and mouth on her spine. He kissed along her back, her sides, and she rolled out of her grip and frowned up at him. “Don’t scowl. You’re too pretty to scowl.”

“And you’re too long married to flirt so much.” Despite her teasing tone, she let him lower himself over her, watching his head bob to brush his lips against the long scar where the triplets had been lifted free of her body all those years ago. “House is quiet without the kids.”

“Mm.” For once, he didn’t seem distracted by the children at all, glancing up at her with a heat in his eyes that kindled the spark in her belly instantly. Pleased, suddenly, that their children were away on various camps and sleepovers. She watched him lay his hand on her bare stomach, fingers tracing stretchmarks and scars and his eyes seeing neither, seeing her as he always had. Helplessly in love. There was grey in his hair and lines around his eyes now, but she wouldn’t have honestly been able to admit to seeing them either though, so they were pretty even. To her, he was ageless and always would be.

Which reminded her… “We need to talk to Livy.”

His mouth on her hip, she felt him twitch and half-smile, but couldn’t tell if it was strained or amused. She suspected a bit of both. “Dibs on doing it,” he said, shockingly. She paused from where she was beginning to cant a little up, a little to the side, breathing faster as she realized where his mouth was heading. Distracting her.

“Why?” she asked suspiciously.

“Because,” he replied, “if I talk to Livy… that means you have to talk to Hotch. Someone has to tell him that our children are probably… _hugging.”_ He said hugging with a touch of horror, a bit of misery, like Livy was still three and hugging meant a cuddle with her daddy and very little else.

“Hugging?” she queried, and he shot her a plaintive look. Maybe, she realized, Livy was a little bit ageless to him as well. “Ah. Okay. Deal. As long as you discuss the safety of… hugging… with her.”

He looked miserable about it, but he always delighted in passing on information. And it really was just a recap of what they’d _already_ taught their children, the day that Livy had announced at the breakfast table that, “Donny told me that boys make babies when they pee, you must have really needed to go to the bathroom when you made those three, Daddy,” to the shock and confusion of the intently listening triplets.

But for now, the subject was dropped, and they celebrated their night alone together. Their anniversary gift to each other: this moment. The seventeenth year of marriage was furniture, apparently, and both hadn’t been entirely captivated by that.

A single night together, they’d decided, would be perfectly adequate.


	19. April 19th: A Warning Bark

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Wordsmith Wednesday – **Mellifluous** – “(of a sound) Pleasingly smooth and musical to hear.”_

Spencer came home to barking.

That was how Emily found them when she arrived half an hour later. Sitting on the floor in the living room on the rug with Mia’s head in his lap, curled to the side with her fingers threading slowly through Snuppy’s fur. Tristan was huddled on the couch with Alyssa tucked under his arm, both glum looking.

Emily looked at the strain around Spencer’s mouth as he rubbed Mia’s arm gently, whispering to her in a soft, slow voice. She couldn’t hear what she was saying, but there was an intense focus to his expression that suggested whatever he was saying was of the utmost importance.

“Hi, Mommy,” Mia managed, her usually clear voice sluggish. “I drew a picture today.”

“Hi, baby,” Emily replied, crouching down beside her and using one hand to wipe sticky tears from Mia’s face and the other to curl over Spencer’s. Snuppy whined, licking Mia’s fingers, tail thumping. “That’s nice. How long?”

“Three minutes.” Spencer shifted, eyes flicking to the kids on the couch. “We can move her. Lay her down where she can sleep.” As one, Tristan and Alyssa slid from the couch and over to the bench in front of Diana’s old piano, still pressed close. Emily helped silently to lift their little daughter up onto the couch, her expression still lost and sleepy as she recovered from her seizure. Leaving her to sleep, she followed Spencer into the kitchen where a half-finished meal lay abandoned. As he returned to cutting the carrots, his hands shook. She took the knife from him, tugging him close into a tight hug that he shivered into.

“It never gets less terrible to see,” he murmured into her hair, his eyes scrunching shut against her. “And every time it’s over and she goes limp in my arms, I feel like I can’t breathe until I’m sure she is. Thank god for Snuppy. She was on the swing when he alerted. She could have—”

“She didn’t,” Emily said, cutting him off before he could spiral into ‘what ifs’. “And you were there. Thank god for you.”

She felt him smile, but whatever he was going to say next was cut off by a soft tune slipping through the open door between the living room and the kitchen. The piano. They leaned back together, watching through the doorway as Tristan and Alyssa fumbled at first over the notes of the music their piano teacher had struggled and strained and eventually given up on teaching them, before the discordant jangle became a smooth, melodious song that lulled their sister to sleep.

“Thank god for them,” Spencer said finally, and Emily couldn’t agree more.


	20. April 20th: A Cat’s Eye

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Typecast Thursday – **ORBS** – Oh dear, there are orbs. They're golden, gleaming, weeping, flashing.... but they're not what you think._

When Olivia was closer to seven than she was to six, Daddy didn’t come home. Mommy did. She came home and talked to their nanny in a mean kind of voice, like she was mad about something Olivia had done. But Olivia was sure she hadn’t; not today anyway. And then Mommy cried, and that was scary enough that Olivia cried too and hid under her bed, wishing Daddy would come home and tell her what was wrong. But he didn’t.

And they’d gone for a trip. Not the triplets, who were too small to go on aeroplanes like Olivia was—because Olivia was the oldest now and allowed to do things like that—but her and Mommy went. Mommy said things like, “We’re going to see Daddy,” and, “He’s not going to look the same as you remember,” and “Hospitals are where very sick people go,” and Olivia thought it was all a bit of a fuss just for Daddy to have a holiday. But then they got to the hospital, which was the same kind of place where the triplets had been born but no one was smiling, and then they got to Daddy.

And Daddy didn’t look right at all.

He was mad to see them. “It’s dangerous,” he whispered in a voice like Olivia wasn’t supposed to hear, and Olivia crept closer to Mommy because it was _scary_ to hear him talk like that. Arms up like she was little and Mommy picked her up and held her tightly, too tightly, and she was shaking. Cold, maybe, and Olivia said, “You should get under the blankets with Daddy if you’re cold.”

Daddy didn’t smile and Mommy didn’t get under the blankets with him and his face was funny to look at. All grey and sick-looking and with a bandage on his neck. But he looked at Olivia and didn’t look mad anymore.

“Oh, baby,” he said instead, and held his arms out to her. Mommy passed her to him and they hugged. Not too tight, not like Mommy, but he was shaking too. Olivia touched the bandage on his neck and he made a soft noise like hurting. “My gorgeous girl. Come here. Shh, shh, it’s okay. I’m okay.”

“What happened?” she asked, and Mommy hissed, “Something that shouldn’t have.”

Daddy snapped, “ _Emily_ ,” back. Everyone was mad. Nothing really made sense about any of this.

They went home and Daddy eventually came home too, but he was sore and slept a lot and had to keep going back to the doctors for a little while. Olivia thought he might be sad. Sometimes she listened when him and Mommy talked. It didn’t make her feel better, and it didn’t make things make any more sense.

_“You need to be careful,”_ Mommy would say at night time as she pressed her mouth against his hair. He was huddled in the blankets, all sweaty and quiet and mumbly because the medicine he was on made his head fuzzy. _“We could have lost you.”_

Olivia was pretty sure that wasn’t true. If Daddy got lost, Mommy would definitely find him. And if Mommy didn’t, Olivia would. Or the triplets, when they got old enough. He wouldn’t be lost for long.

She went back to her room and thought about that a bit more, before digging out her crafty box and paints. And she worked and she worked and she worked—hiding her light when Mommy came to check on her—until it was done. It took almost a week, which was longer than a day but not quite so long as a month, but a very long time anyway. And then she took it to Daddy, who was looking kind of better and the bandage was smaller now.

“What’s this?” he asked when Olivia held up her present for him. She’d made it out of ping-pong balls and anything round she could find, orbs and marbles and painted seeds from the garden. Lots of glitter shed from it as she scrambled up—carefully—onto his lap and wobbled a little, her creation clattering together on the coat-hangers she’d attached it to.

“It’s the sky,” she explained, pointing. “See. These are the stars you always show me. The ones that people before TV used to use to find their way home—and this is us.” Us was her favourite marble, the one that Daddy called a ‘cat’s eye’, and she’d painted a smiley face on it because home was the kind of place you smiled at. “And I checked with the stars outside and this way if you can see the stars, you can come home if you get lost again.”

Daddy blinked. Olivia worried for a minute that he didn’t like her present.

But then he smiled, just like the smile on their marble, all wonky and silly and kind of crooked.

“It’s wonderful,” he said quietly, and hugged her much, much too tight. “How ever could I get lost with a map like this?”

“Damn right you can’t,” Olivia replied, and got in trouble for swears even though Uncle Rossi had taught her them and _he_ didn’t get in trouble for saying damn or heck.

But she didn’t really mind.


	21. April 21st: A Watcher

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Fiendish Friday – **Inert** – Tell the story of an inanimate object, from the object’s POV._

I saw a wedding. Held in hands that didn’t shake, I watched two people continue their lives together under the shady boughs of an elderly oak. A leaf fell on the bride’s veil; she didn’t seem to mind. The groom cried as she approached him; he didn’t seem ashamed. They kissed and the crowd seemed to hold its breath with them. I watched them wed and then I watched them dance and then I was put away for some time, in the quiet and the dark.

I saw a birth. I heard a gasping cry, a wet intake of breath, and I heard the new father say, “I can’t believe this is real.” I heard the mom reassure him it was, _it so fucking is, trust me, Spencer._

I saw Olivia. I saw her look up at me with dark, endless eyes as she grasped for the toy held just out of reach. I saw her painted in blues and reds and smiling as she spread that paint out around her. I saw her walk, tottering and fearless, into her father’s arms. I saw her dance and cry and laugh and scream and shout. I remembered all those moments in case they ever needed reminding.

I saw those that followed. I didn’t see their birth, but I was there in the quiet moment after as a nurse held me and the three little babies with their coloured bracelets met their family. Their father held Olivia to them; I watched as she reached down with a chubby hand and I watched as a smaller one reached up to meet hers. I watched those hands meet, and I watched her hold her brother’s hand for the very first time.

I watched those babies grow and I watched one more join, and all the moments in-between. I was there the first time Alyssa discovered that not every chemical liked being mixed with every other chemical. My vision was never quite the same once I was rescued from the wreckage of the kitchen and used as evidence as to why Alyssa should be given a lab in the shed, perhaps a few years from now. I was there when Tristan began sneaking out of the house in the middle of the night, keeping him company as he slipped through silent alleys and noiseless parks to find somewhere in the hushed hours of the morning that was just his own. So far as I know, he hid the evidence, and no one but us ever knew that he did this.

I was there for holidays and weddings and births and the small things otherwise forgotten. I went on a car-trip with the family when everyone was small and happy and I went on one alone with their father and filmed a last sunset of a dying mother. Eventually, I grew slow, I grew tired, and the quiet and the dark welcomed me more often than a shout of _who has the camera?_

I saw a final car-trip. Only two came with me. A boy drove, his hand on Olivia’s knee. Olivia held me and together we watched the world outside turn from day to night, from suburbs to farmland.

They left me on the hood as they stopped to peer out at a fearsome sunset. And I watched one more kiss.

“I love you,” said the boy, his hand cupping her chin and his eyes just as wide and shocked as the groom’s in the wedding I’d watched so long ago, and Olivia laughed and replied in turn. A breeze came, knocking me from the hood. I saw, one final time, the ground.

I didn’t see again, but I always remembered. 


	22. April 22nd: A Tempestuous Relationship

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Snapshot Saturday – **Feet –** Image Prompt_

“Ma’am, is this your daughter?”

Emily closed her eyes for a heartbeat, counted to three, and then turned to stare at her daughter right as Spencer exclaimed, “Cary, _why_?”

Cary sniffed loudly, her face rapidly welting and swelling. The gas station attendant’s face was a picture of horror, a candy bar in his one loose hand, the other holding her arm. “I just wanted to see what it would do,” Cary whined thickly, glancing guiltily at the wrapper that proudly proclaimed _made with real peanuts!_ Spencer was already going for the antihistamines in his bag as the owner rushed out and began alternating between being furious about the stolen candy bar and panicking over the clear allergic reaction occurring in his store.

_At least the others are behaving,_ Emily thought distantly, before delving into the panic.

 

* * *

 

“Alyssa! He didn’t mean it!” Olivia ran up the highway after her furious sister, glancing nervously over her shoulder to where the gas station with her parents inside sat. She _hoped_ that Cary did what she’d said she was going to and distracted them, somehow, while Olivia retrieved their spitfire sister.

“Yes, he did,” Alyssa stormed, bag on her shoulder and face determined. “He said he won’t teach me a magic trick because I’m too _boring._ I hate him. I’m _leaving_.”

“And I thought Cary was the melodramatic one,” Olivia muttered, catching up to her sister and grabbing her elbow, yanking her around to face her. “Where are you even _going_? We’re in the middle of nowhere!”

“Canada,” Alyssa replied. Olivia blinked. “There are moose there. And _no_ Tristans.”

“Well, I should think there’s at least one Tristan,” Olivia said unhelpfully. Alyssa’s face darkened dangerously. “Look, if you promise to come back and get in the car, I’ll…” Alyssa smiled. Olivia swore silently. This was going to cost her. Anything to stop them all from getting reamed by their parents…

Or… it didn’t have to cost _her_.

“You’ll what?” Alyssa asked smugly, and Olivia smiled.

 

* * *

 

On the bright side, aside from Cary’s sudden foray into criminality, everyone else seemed to be happy. Spencer eyed his family in the rear-view mirror as they drove onwards towards home, a sleepy gaggle of kids and dog watching him back. All except for Tristan and Alyssa in the far back seats, who had their heads tucked together and appeared to be…

“Are you teaching Alyssa magic?” Spencer asked, turning in his seat to look at them, unable to help the grin on his face. Tristan was _fiercely_ possessive about the tricks he knew—he wouldn’t even tell Spencer how most of them were done, and certainly not Alyssa with whom he had a tumultuous kind of siblinghood. “That’s wonderful, Tris. It’s so good to see you guys working together.”

Alyssa beamed. “Trissy just wants me to be happy, right Tris?” she chirped.

Tristan glared.

“Everything is fine, Daddy,” Olivia mumbled sleepily from where she had her head pillowed on Mia’s car-seat. “We’re having a great time.”

Spencer began to feel uneasy.


	23. April 23rd: A… What?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Scenic Sunday – **AHHHH!** – Your character thinks the only thing that could improve this scene is the inevitable heat death of the universe. And soon._

Cooper Bradley was the smartest boy in school, barring Tristan, but Tristan didn’t count because he was her brother, duh. There was just _something_ about Cooper. Alyssa had gotten paired with him for chemistry and despite the fact he was a senior and way older than her and wasn’t ever awkward when that was all she was, he seemed _excited_ to be paired with her. Probably because she was a freshman taking senior classes, and still the best student in the class.

But then he’d asked her on a date. _A date._ And she’d said yes. And it had been amazing.

Until now.

Good god, until now.

Until her _family_ had showed up.

“Hi, Cooper,” said Mom, sliding into the booth beside them and very calmly beginning to dismantle and clean all seven of her guns while Alyssa and Coop stared open-mouth at her. “How are you?”

“Mom, what are you doing?” Alyssa hissed, glancing around the restaurant in horror, face burning. The gun pile kept getting bigger. The _guns_ kept getting bigger. And Mom did NOT break unending eye-contact with Cooper the whole time.

“Um,” said Cooper, but was distracted by Dad sliding into the booth on the other side.

“Hi,” he said, with one of his charmingly distracted smiles. He was wearing a green sweater vest with purple spots and Alyssa blinked because it was astoundingly bright. “Did you know that your shoelaces come undone because the knot is subject to forces of up to 7G with every step you take?”

“Uh,” said Cooper.

“Daaaad,” Alyssa moaned.

“Honey, shh, I’m _helping,”_ Dad replied with a loud wink. “I’m wooing him with science. We love science, don’t we Emily?”

Mom smiled, nodded, and pulled out a huge gun to lay on the table with a thump. And then beginning to stroke it. Lovingly.

“I think I’m gonna go…” Cooper said, standing and backing away, but Cary and Olivia appeared like wraiths and grabbed each arm.

“Do you like crime scenes?” Olivia demanded. “I love crime scenes. Want to see a crime scene?”

“Want to _be_ a crime scene?” Cary added with a wicked smile.

“I wooed your mother with science,” Dad was still saying, wistfully. “So much science. So much wooing. It worked you know, that’s why we have so many children. Lots of sex.”

“Ahhh!” screamed Alyssa. “Ahhhh! No!” She turned to run but Cooper was behind her.

“Ahh, Lys,” he said, looking guilty. “I don’t think it’s going to work out. You see, I’ve met someone else.”

Tristan appeared, taking his hand. “Sorry Lys,” he said glumly. “But this is clearly an unconscious manifestation of your insecurities about being seen as simply one of many within the bounds of our admittedly unconventional family—”

“Sooo much sex,” Dad continued, tapping one finger on one of Mom’s guns.

Alyssa woke up with a gasp, on the couch with a book on her chest and her heart hammering as Mia watched some kid cartoon on mute. “Ah, Alyssa,” said Dad, walking in and seeing her. “Here you are. Your mother and I were just—”

“Ahhh!” screamed Alyssa, and ran. 


	24. April 24th: A Snuppy Farewell

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Maxim Monday – **William Wordsworth**_ – _"What though the radiance that was once so bright, be now forever taken from my sight. Though nothing can bring back the hour of splendor in the grass, of glory in the flower; We will grieve not, rather find strength in what remains behind."_

Snuppy sighed under Spencer’s hand as he stroked down the dog’s silky ears, ears that were laid back sadly while he woefully observed Mia through the living room window as she helped Emily pack the car. With a curly mass of strawberry blonde hair tied back into a rough ponytail and dressed in a dark peacoat and slacks, Mia looked both incredibly alike and yet not at all like her mother standing next to her. Spencer sighed too, watching wistfully as his still gorgeous wife tossed a suitcase into the backseat and turned to ruffle the fur of the golden retriever sitting patiently aside the car on the leaf-strewn lawn.

_Tock tock_ went Snup’s tail on the floor, the noise echoing through the silent house. _Tock tock_ it went, hopefully perking his ears as a snippet of excited conversation drifted through the open front door.

“I know, buddy,” Spencer said softly, threading his fingers through the old dog’s fur and looking down sadly at the white-film covering his eyes. “I hate being left behind as well. But we did a good job, Snup. Raised them well, kept them safe…”

“Yeah, you did.” Emily’s voice was soft, leaning through the door and smiling sadly at them. Eyes overbright. This was it. Last bird out of the proverbial nest. “We did a damn good job, Spence. And you, Snup.”

Snuppy whined, still unsure about his new role as ‘pet’ instead of ‘steadfast protector’.

“Aw, is Snuppy already missing me and Bilbo?” Mia asked, appearing behind Emily and skirting past to hug her oldest friend. “We’ll come back and visit you, Snup. You have to stay here and look after Dad, okay? Can’t leave him alone for a minute—this’ll be your hardest job yet.” And she laughed, smiling up at Spence who smiled back, pretending this was fine.

This was totally fine.

“College isn’t ready for another Reid-Prentiss,” he said instead of _don’t go_ , and reached out to hug his youngest close. “You better go and show them that we didn’t peak with Tristan.” Her mouth against his chest, Mia sniffled. Damnit. She was crying.

Spencer breathed deeply.

“It’s okay to be sad, Dad,” she said, and Snuppy chose that moment to whine mournfully.

Spencer burst into tears.

It was over. They’d done it. Five kids grown up and moved out and not needing their parents anymore. Well, needing him. He was pretty sure they’d always need Emily. But his one trick was really not needed anymore, once they’d stopped needing stories read to them every night—

“Wanna know why I called her Bilbo?” Mia said suddenly, looking over at the dog sitting quietly on duty behind her, tail flicking with barely restrained glee as Emily petted her.

Spencer blinked; said damply; “Because you love _The Hobbit_?”

“I do.” Mia finally let go, stepping back to wipe her nose with her sleeve. Emily made a noise of irritation, Mia wincing and reaching for a tissue. “Because that was the first ever book I remember you reading to me. And doing the voices. And I wanted to take a piece of that with me, Dad.”

Oh.

“Oh,” said Spencer, and looked at the dogs. At Snuppy, who was retired but certainly not unneeded, and Bilbo who was needed but certainly not unloved. “I’m being silly again, aren’t I?”

“Always,” Emily reassured him, holding open the front door. “And it’s time to go. Are we done bawling? She’s going to college, not Canada.”

“Too many Tristans in Canada,” Mia replied, and took his hand to leave their home together. 


	25. April 25th: A Babysitting Dilemma

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Tonal Tuesday – **Mischievous** – The tone is impish! A plot is afoot! Are we malicious or naughty or just perilously playful?_

Hotch was beginning to think he hadn’t quite thought this through. His phone beeped as he levelled his stoniest glare at the fierce expression being aimed back at him from across the picnic table.

**Rossi: _Wait, you offered to babysit the WHOLE clan? All of them??_**

Shooting back a quick **_yes and would you please answer my original question, Dave_** , Hotch looked back up at the scowling Olivia.

“Eat your lunch and then you can play,” he said firmly. Jack, glancing from one to the other with his eyebrow up, wisely chose to continue nibbling at his own sandwich without making a sound.

“I _can’t_ ,” Olivia grumbled, shrinking down. From behind them, three shrieks sounded. With reflexes honed by years of FBI training, Hotch switched his attention from the seven-year-old refusing to eat her cold serve back to the three four-year-olds playing some kind of complicated spinning game on the playground behind them. “You muddled it.”

“I did not ‘muddle’ your lunch,” said Hotch.

“It’s inedible,” Olivia declared. “The celery is touching the cheese and the lettuce is fractionally uneven. Also, no one _likes_ beets.”

“I like beets,” said Jack helpfully.

“Oh, they’re okay,” Olivia replied at the speed of light, grabbing a piece and eating it. Hotch saw his chance.

“Jack’s almost finished his lunch, despite his fractionally uneven lettuce,” he said absently, turning his back on them both and eyeing the triplets as they scattered apart. Cary and Lys appeared to be bickering over the slide, as Lys sat at top and folded her arms, refusing to move. Tristan was drawing fractions in the bark-chips. “Guess he’ll get to go play without you.”

“He wouldn’t do that,” she declared. Hotch counted to three. “… Would you?”

Hotch’s phone hummed.

**Rossi: _Brave man. Olivia will try to trick you about her lunch, don’t let her. It’s a test. Don’t try to outwit Tristan, he’ll take it as a challenge. Don’t try to outstubborn Alyssa, she’ll think it’s a marvellous game. Cary’s a sweetheart, if you wrangle the others, she’ll be fine. But don’t let them watch Finding Nemo._**

“Hmm,” said Hotch, and turned to find both plates empty. He blinked.

“Done,” Jack and Olivia said as one, bounding away from the table. A scream from behind them sounded; the stand-off over the slide had reached critical mass. Hotch sighed and wandered over there.

“I only want to go down if I can climb back up,” Alyssa shouted.

“You can’t climb back up, it’s a slide not a climb!” Cary screamed back, stamping her foot. Hotch stood there, the pride of the FBI, the man who put fear into serial killers’ hearts; completely ignored by both of them. “You don’t understand playgrounds, stupid!”

Alyssa set her jaw stubbornly. “I will,” she said, and slid down. Cary watched.

“Can’t climb back up now,” she told her sister.

“I will!” screamed Alyssa, and turned to do just that. And slipped. And tried again. And stopped.

Then they both looked at Hotch.

“Well?” said Cary.

“Yeah, well?” said Alyssa. “It’s your turn.”

Hotch blinked again. “To… slide?” he asked warily.

“No,” said Alyssa. “ _You know._ To Mom!”

“Yeah, to Mom!” finished Cary. Silence fell on the playground as the three looked at each other. A lip wobbled. Hotch began to feel wildly out of his depth. A hand slipped into his, a small weight cuddling against his leg. He looked down into wide hazel eyes blinking up at him from behind thick glasses.

“You have to tell her she can’t,” Tristan said softly. “So she can prove you wrong. That’s what Mommy does.”

“Oh,” said Hotch. He looked at Alyssa. “You can’t?”

“I can,” she said smugly, and scrambled up the slide to perch proudly on the top. “And I did! I can do anything!”

“Bet you can’t jump,” Cary said.

Hotch decided now was probably time to go home. “How about we go and watch a movie at my place?” he said hurriedly, catching Alyssa midleap and almost sending Tristan sprawling as he lunged forward. “What movie would you like to watch?”

“Finding Nemo!” Cary and Tristan hollered.

Alyssa whimpered.


	26. April 26th: A Quiet Night

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Wordsmith Wednesday – **Somnambulism –** “Walking in one's sleep or under hypnosis.”_

Emily hated the night times. They’d been fun again recently, as she adjusted the triplets to their brand-new toddler beds, but now that that was over and Spencer was away on cases, she hated the loneliness of them. Curled on the couch in the living room with a blanket on her knees and a book laid aside, she tapped anxiously at her phone and tried not to feel out of place.

**To Spencer: _I think I should go back to work soon. I’m sure we can find someone willing to live in with the kids. Au paire?_**

And she sat in silence, alone but for the ticking of a clock in the kitchen, waiting for a reply. Feeling stopped, stolen. Like she was doing nothing when she should be _out there_ , and Spencer had quietly told her she’d never take to staying at home full time, but had she listened?

She refused to resent her kids for it, and so she was waiting for Spencer to send back the inevitable **_can we afford that?_** so she could take all this pent-up frustration out on him instead. The reply finally came—she pretended that she hadn’t spent every minute of waiting imagining him under the barrel of a gun again.

**Spencer: _I think that’s a good idea. It doesn’t feel right without you here._**

Oh. She curled a little closer and smiled at the text on the phone, feeling as silly and giddy as she had so many years ago, when he’d slipped a ring on her finger and declared himself hers. A stair creaked. Soft footsteps. She looked up and around as Tristan wobbled in, still unsteady on his feet and with his eyes glazed.

“Trissy?” she said, putting her phone down and sitting upright, but he ignored her and toddled right on past. She caught his hand. “Baby, hey. Hey. Shh, come here.”

But he tugged, stopped, looked at her, and then wordlessly climbed up into her lap, curled up close, and began breathing deeply. She blinked, folding her hands over him and staring down at her ruffle-haired son. Then she frowned.

**To Spencer: _Did you ever sleepwalk?_**

“I should put you back to bed,” she said to Tristan while waiting for a reply, but he was warm and peaceful and a small part of her pointed out _going back to work means you’ll miss **this**_ , so instead she leaned back and tucked the blanket around him, holding her boy close to her heart with his hands curled against her chest. “I’ll do it soon.”

**Spencer: _Yes, why? When I was little._**

She didn’t reply, just smiled and leaned her head against the sweet-smelling hair under her chin. Closing her eyes and savouring this. They’d probably have to baby-gate the stairs, check the windows for locks, sleepwalk proof…she woke slowly, once, to lips against her forehead and a deep, sleep-rough voice murmuring, “ _I’m home, love, come on. Come to bed,_ ” and then she woke again in her own bed in his arms.

“Tris sleepwalks,” she mumbled. He chuckled against her back.

“Interesting,” Spencer replied, and then she was asleep again. 


	27. April 27th: A Round-Robin

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Typecast Thursday – **Big Lipped Alligator Moment –** It’s a dark and stormy night, and this narrative is about to get wacky._

The power was out, the internet with it, and life as they knew it appeared to be over. There was no point in living anymore as the doomed family gathered in the library, lightning crackling and rain lashing the windows.

“We could tell stories,” Mia said, bouncing up and down eagerly. Next to her, Cary was trying to feed Snuppy bananas. Snuppy did not want to eat the bananas. There would later be questions about the sheer amount of banana in Snuppy’s thick fur. “I love stories!”

“Dad’s not here though and he tells the best stories,” Tristan said glumly, reading a book on pirates by the light of his cell phone. “Him and Mom won’t be home for _hours_.”

“We don’t need them to tell stories,” Olivia said with a toss of her head, dragging a notebook out and flipping through pages and pages of angsty teenage poetry until she found one that was blank and stole Tris’s cell for light. “Come on. We’ll go paragraph by paragraph and show them when they get home. I’ll start.”

And this was what they wrote.

 

* * *

 

_Once upon a time in a world like this one but somehow very different, there was a collective of children in a dark and dreary place. They found a warm castle, although it looked quite mouldering from the outside, and huddled within together. For they were siblings, as a litter of kittens is siblings, and they intended to remain siblings for as long as possible, facing the dark together. Within that mouldering castle, they stayed together and discussed what was to come next in their adventures. For there were beasts outside with tremendous teeth and terrifying howls that would rend their bodies unto tiny bloody pieces, and even the bravest of the children quailed at the idea of facing them._

They were very logical about things. We should remain inside, they declared as one unit. For it is warm and safe in here and the monster stay without. In fact, they said again, it would be incredibly unwise for us to ever leave this castle and go outside into the dark, and so they stayed inside forever and instead devoted their lives to the pursuit of knowledge and understanding and so grew themselves into wise and venerable people.

**BUT THEN ONE DAY BOOOM THE BEASTS BURST IN AND ATE TWO OF THE CHILDREN UP OM NOM NOM AND THEY WERE DEAD OH ~~FUCK~~ AND THE OTHER CHILDREN WERE FEROCIOUSLY MAD. THEY SAID “THESE ~~BITCHES~~ BEASTS ARE GOING DOWN” AND GATHERED THEIR WEAPONS AND MARCHED AGAINST THE DARK. **

~~And they marched, oh how they marched, for days and days and the fog pressed in around them like wispy curtains of billowing purple and it drained them of their hope and their cheer until they were all damp and melancholic and thinking sadly of home and their lost siblings. And they began to weep, glistening tears that caught no light from the dreary place, because they were lost and simply wanted to return to the topaz spires and well-lit place where they remembered being young and safe.~~

BuT THEn MOMMY bAbby DAD SAVED THEm anb SnuPPy TO. THEy Go HomE anb HaVe CAKE!!! YAy CAKE Yay YAY

**WRITTEN BY THE COLLECTIVE EFFORTS OF US:**

_Olivia ‘Edgar’ Reid-Prentiss, of the age of sixteen_

T. A. Reid-Prentiss, aged XIII.

**ALYSSA. 13.**

~~Xx~~Lady Cary Caroline, thirteen-years-of-age~~Xx~~

MiA iS 6 YeaRS EGG TobAy (Anb SnuPPy)


	28. April 28th: A Final Day

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Fiendish Friday – **Simple, right? –** Describe love. Simple, right? Now do it in twenty words or less._

On the last day they laid together, their tired hands were clasped.

They never ended, despite the finality of it.


	29. April 29th: A Lonely Heart

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Snapshot Saturday – **Idyllic –** Image Prompt_

It was probably something of an idiosyncrasy that Tristan, having grown up in a family such as his, craved isolation with something close to religious zealotry. But at the same time, it grated on him. When he was surrounded by people, in his college dorms or home for the madcap race of family get-togethers, he’d sequester himself in a corner with his lanky frame folded around a book or his laptop and wistfully dream of a midnight library. When alone, as he desired, he’d unconsciously strain his ears for a shout of _Trissy_ or giggles from a gaggle of sisters, or even his father wandering nearby humming. And he’d feel lonely.

“I’m dissatisfied,” he complained one day to his father, as the two of them packed groceries into the trunk of his father’s car. His dad, with worldly wisdom, looked at him and _hmm_ ’d quietly in the back of his throat. “I want to be alone but when I am, I hate it. And I’m supposed to be taking this position in _Canada_ of all places, Dad, but I’m worried when I get there—despite wanting it—I’ll find it’s not to taste. I don’t know my own desires…”

“I’m manic, often,” Dad replied, leaning against the car with slow thoughtfulness. Tristan waited; Dad often took a while to get to the point, but his points were almost always valid. “When I’m not manic, I’m pensive. And often this leads to—”

“Melancholy,” Tristan answered, because he knew this feeling well. It followed him, always.

“We’re not people who take well to loneliness,” Dad said, nodding. “But there’s a middle ground between lonely and crowded, Tris. It only takes one.”

“And if I never find that one?” Tristan grumbled, because it felt like he never would. He didn’t _want_ a partner, to be saddled to another for his wellbeing. He saw how happy it made his parents, but it still wasn’t something he craved.

Dad chuckled. “I did.”

“And what did you do when you found them?”

“I married her.”

Three years later, Tristan went on holiday. By himself, because he was still trying to find that middle ground, into the Canadian Rockies to try and find himself more of a foundation in this place he’d decided to call home. And he spent his nights wandering the ridges with a camera in hand and fog drifting from his mouth and nose, thinking about home and the inevitability of loneliness. He returned to the small bank of cabins and found a woman sitting alone out the front of hers, a smoke in her hand and a dog on her feet. “Hello,” she said. “I’m Cassie. Cold out here, huh?”

He didn’t marry her. He did join her that night, and the night after, and a year later when they conspired to return to the same place at the same time. They weren’t in love, although Tristan considered that he could be if he put his mind to it. It was entirely the kind of midnight whispering that his father would have frowned a little to hear of, as there were others in their lives outside of these lonely cabins and they weren’t always loyal, but Tristan thought sometimes that his mother might have understood the appeal of being reckless.

And five years later, when he was still unsettled as she was a drifting as ever, they fucked up.

“I don’t want it,” she told him firmly.

He thought about it. “I do,” he said quietly. “But I respect your desires.” And she looked at him for the longest time.

It probably wasn’t anything either of his parents would have approved of, but Tristan had always been the unsurprising one, and perhaps he was overdue for a calamity. He named her Eleanor and only knew her mother from then on as a cheque in the mail once a month. It wasn’t traditional, but nor was it lonely.

And they were happy, just the two of them.


	30. April 30th: A Silent Swing

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _Scenic Sunday – **Ah** – Ah, it’s an end, the scene of a terrible end, but maybe also the scene of a beginning…_

Emily knew him well enough by now that she knew that when he was sitting like this, he just needed to be… alone. And so he was, in the blustery backyard with the swollen grey clouds above looming down on him.

The moods had never quite left him. This life he’d never expected to have, his tremendously loving wife and his wonderfully erratic children and the friends that were more like family; none of them had stopped the nights when a niggling voice in the back of his mind would remind him over and over that he didn’t _deserve_ any of it.

And now it was over. Not just the kids, grown up and moved out and gone away. Tristan in Canada working on aerospace engineering, Olivia in major crimes, Cary making slow waves in the art scene in LA, Lys quietly collecting degrees and broken hearts, Mia working with disability dogs in a state-wide funding program…

Emily, long retired.

Him, looking back on his last week at the BAU.

They’d given him a watch. The FBI as a collective, not his team. He held it in his hands in the brisk winter cool and scuffed his shoe gently in the dirt under the disused swing-set in their backyard, examining the lonely space. There, Olivia’s overgrown vegetable garden. Alyssa’s chemistry shed, now spider-webby and forgotten. The tree that Tristan used to climb in the middle of the night and fall asleep in watching the stars. The hole in the fence the kids had made seeing how hard they could kick a ball at the same place. They’d tried to cover it up by stealing a plant from up the street and replanting it in front, not realizing that the sudden fern sprouting out of the middle of unkempt lawn might be a _little_ suspicious. And he hurt, just a little bit, for all the time that he’d walked through and left behind. What did he have to show for it? Grey hair and an aching heart.

The door opened behind him, a foot scuffing the back porch. Around the lump in his throat, Spencer curled his hands tighter on the chain of the swing and looked at the ground, croaking out, “Not now, Em. Not yet.”

“Ganpa?” said a shrill voice, the footsteps louder as he was spotted and bolted towards. Spencer jerked up, looking around as the ache vanished and he almost laughed at the toddler leaping in place. “Ganpa, swing!”

“Charlie,” Spencer said, standing and catching his grandson midleap and swinging him in mid-air. “Hello, you.”

“Hello, me,” Charlie said obediently, smiling. “Gamma mad.”

Spencer looked up. Emily was leaning in the doorway, smiling with her eyes but not her mouth. “Grandma says it’s time to come in out of the cold and stop moping,” she said, holding her hand out to them. Spencer took it, letting himself be drawn up onto the porch. “Olivia and Jack are here for dinner.”

“I’m not moping,” Spencer said, kissing her cheek and hugging her close, Charlie squeaking between them. “Who says I’m moping?”

“I do,” she replied, and then lowered her voice. “We’re not done yet, Spencer Reid. Not by a long shot. We’ve got living left to do.”

And Spencer laughed and followed her inside. She was right.

There was so much left to see.

**Author's Note:**

> **Edited in August, 2017.**


End file.
